Stanford Press Pioneers Digital Humanities Publication with "Born-Digital" Project
An annotated photograph on Nicholas Bauch's upcoming website, "Enchanting the Desert." Photo courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
The Center and CESTA postdoctoral researcher Nicholas Bauch has spent the last three years exploring the work of the early-20th-century photographer Henry Peabody, whose travelogue of the Grand Canyon is one of the earliest surviving such collections. Nick's research has led him from back-country hikes above the Colorado River to computer labs where he has geomapped and analyzed the photographs and their documentation of the canyon's features, while developing an interactive website presenting the photographs, analytical essays, and maps of the canyon. Nick says the site allows users to explore the geography on their own terms, in a way that "would be unwieldy on paper, but on a digital platform becomes seamlessly navigable."
In 2014, his work, "Enchanting the Desert," became the very first "born digital" project to be accepted for publication by the Stanford University Press. Nick has written a post today for the Press' blog expressing his elation that digital humanities ("DH") has been validated by a publisher.
Until now, no university press has been willing and/or able to critically peer-review and publish meaningful research projects that are “born-digital.” Because of SUP’s prescient digital publishing initiative, the gap between what DH scholars are making and the established pathways of traditional academic distribution and accreditation is now much, much smaller. Until now, this gap threatened the very survival of DH because there was no incentive for a group of researchers to spend their time building a digital platform to advance their arguments when there was always the looming pressure to do the “real work” of publishing.
Nick continues,
The SUP initiative is not only an outlet, but a lightning rod, announcing to the academic world that DH is, quite literally, official. The hope that I share with the editors and directors at SUP is that from this point forward you can use digital media to express ideas, and that—just like books—if they are deemed good ideas by professional peer-reviewers and editors, they might be published.
