25 June 2023
So these two digital humanities meet up …
It sounds like the start of a promising joke – and it can actually be amusing when differing expectations, presuppositions and aims collide, with everybody believing that they all know what is meant. In a discipline like the digital humanities (DH), which does not yet have a long tradition of developing its own terminology, researchers with very different academic backgrounds are thrown together. There is a high risk of misunderstandings with the traditional humanities: in the best-case scenario everyone can have a laugh about it, but far more often it proves costly in terms of people’s time, money and sanity.
Collaborative, expandable, open – working on terminology in the digital humanities
For this reason, the working group ‘Digital Humanities Theorie’ of the association Verband Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e. V. has taken on the task of collating terminology in the digital humanities. It has produced the discursive glossary Begriffe der Digital Humanities, which appeared in May 2023 as part of the Working Papers series published by the journal Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften (ZfdG).
Right from the start, the glossary was a collaborative and open project: both the suggestions for the concepts and the structure of the entries were developed by the working group with the involvement of the DH community. This meant that it was possible to recruit authors via open calls.
Fig. 1: View of the first four glossary entries on the project’s website
Yet the Diskursives Glossar does not claim to be complete. In fact, it has been set up as an expandable platform that can absorb ongoing updates: its publisher, the Digital Humanities Theorie working group, has issued a call for people to submit suggestions for other concepts.
The 13 entries which have initially been published each contain one term, which is defined, its origins explained, and the dimensions of its meaning laid out. After the entry has appeared, anyone who is interested is able to comment on and evaluate it: an open public peer-review process makes it possible to express criticism or praise and make corrections or additions, with discussions generated by answers to other comments. As soon as this phase of public evaluation concludes on 1 September 2023, the glossary will be reworked by the authors and then the versioned entries will be published.
Fig. 2: Example of a graphic representation of dimensions of meaning, taken from the glossary entry for ‘Modell’ by Ramona Roller
Digital opportunities
While it is true that print publications can also involve collaboration, expandability and openness, the process here is transparent to a degree that can only be achieved through digital means: the commentaries from the public evaluation process are directly linked to the entry, the first published version remains accessible and any changes that are made can be tracked at a glance by comparing the versions digitally.
The aim of the ZfdG’s working papers is to explore various options for digital publishing. The series provides important impulses by focusing on unexplored questions or fundamental issues in the digital humanities and opening them up to discussion.
Fig. 4: Three publications on key issues in the digital humanities have appeared so far in the Working Papers series.
The Working Papers thus supplement not only the specialist articles and project overviews that are summarised in the journal’s annual reviews but also the special issues, which bring together multiple articles on specific subjects under separate editorship. What all the articles in the ZfdG share is that they are only published digitally and are completely open-access: no registration is required to access the articles, and all the texts, data and media can be retrieved and downloaded free of charge at any point. Moreover, the ZfdG does not charge authors and editors any publication fees – a form of publishing known as diamond open access.
The ZfdG
The ZfdG was created as a project of the Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel Research Association (MWW) in order to satisfy the need for a German-language digital humanities journal that incorporates innovative strategies from the fields of open access and open science. The journal is independent of established publishing structures and distribution channels and is published jointly by the MWW and the association Verband Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e. V. In addition to its focus on providing access to all the published articles free of charge, the ZfdG is also committed to developing quicker and more efficient means of publication, an XML-based publication workflow and reliable processes for quality control. As well as the evaluation process described above, in which authors can themselves decide how open and public they wish the process to be, the specialist editors play a decisive role in ensuring a high level of quality by evaluating the planned publications and deciding whether articles should be accepted or rejected.
This dual-level system for quality control has proven a key factor in establishing the ZfdG firmly in the digital humanities community, where it is read, cited and taken into account for upcoming publications. The Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel is the home for all these activities: this is where the editorial staff are based, tinkering with ways of implementing technological and content-related innovations, copyediting the submitted texts, cataloguing and publishing the articles and channelling the numerous communication flows on issues – some specific, others more abstract – connected with digital publication.
Title image: Cover of the working group ‘Digital Humanities Theorie’ of the association Verband Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e. V. (ed.): Begriffe der Digital Humanities: Ein diskursives Glossar, Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften, Working Paper 2 (Wolfenbüttel 2023), 25 May 2023, HTML / XML / PDF. DOI: 10.17175/wp_2023
The author
