During my time with the research division, I became familiar with Press Forward plugin development and functionality and Digital Humanities Now’s funding model, editorial workflow, publication process and traffic statistics.  Though, I had been reading and nominating posts for DHNow earlier in the semester, my time in research gave me a fuller understanding of the trends in digital humanities and popular blog posts on the subject as well.  This came primarily from compiling the most popular or relevant posts over the past year.  Of particular interest to me seemed to be the move to global perspectives on resource building and scholarship, how digital humanities teaching employs critical investigation, libraries grappling with linked data models, and the transform DH movement to build more robust analyses of race, gender, sexuality and disability.

I also did some research on open access for a Press Forward white paper and learned a lot about the history of open access and how scientists approached the topic.  I was surprised to find out how much authors are required to pay to be published in open access science journals and it seems that there is a shift from library subscription models to departmental funding for scholarly publication.

I set up my own Press Forward installation and was able to follow along a bit in a meeting about reworking database assets to speed up plugin functionality.  I also tested a new Press Forward theme.  Both of these processes exposed me to some changes in the WordPress api since I last built a site, which was over five years ago, which will be of great use if I intend to build another site with this growing platform.

When I was last at CHNM, while doing my master’s, Dan Cohen first proposed and built DH Now during a ThatCamp.  It was originally built to automatically re-post popular DH blog work, with little labor required.  Reading the PressForward and DH Now proposals and white papers published in the last few years, helped me understand how the original automation was transformed into a fairly time-consuming editorial process, and finally to a more streamlined approach that benefits greatly from the inclusion on volunteer editors-at-large which contribute nominations from the perspective of a variety of academics, museum and library professionals.