It’s interesting to be on the other side of the production of something like DHNow/JDH. Not only does sorting through material for each offer a unique opportunity to explore current events and conversations in the digital humanities, but this process also encourages deeper examination of blog posts and white papers to pull out threads of argument and evidence that can be used to connect disparate conversations across fields. Archaeologists and manuscript historians share common interests with those working in hard sciences and linguistics, although their work is rarely presented in the same forum. Part of what JDH adds to the DH community is this willingness to collect and edit work from across several disciplines and present them as part of a united DH culture.

I’ve learned, as a graduate student working on these projects, that being a part of this collecting and collating work requires a willingness to explore a wide-range of interests, and to read blog posts, white papers, and poster projects that have little to do with my own projects or areas of expertise. For example, most of the content for JDH comes from the pool of content chosen for Editors’ Choice features on DHNow, a selection process that requires Editors-in-Chief for a chosen week to read through content nominated by a group of editors-at-large whose experience in the DH community is variable. The job of the EC is to sort through these nominations, pulling out relevant job postings, conference and event announcements, calls for participation, and useful resources, then picking one or two items to feature as the Editors’ Choice for the Tuesday and Thursday of that week.

The selection of these Editors’ Choice items is left largely up to the EC for the week. There are guidelines, of course. These featured items need to be of substantial length, usually more than 500 words or 20 min. in video/presentation playback, and should make a relevant, substantive, and perhaps even provocative argument that adds to or initiates a conversation in the field. Since DHNow only links to these posts — there’s no editing involved — they should also be well-written and, if necessary, thoroughly cited. White papers and articles are generally only posted if they haven’t been published in other journals or periodicals.

While these guidelines are helpful, on good weeks Editors-at-Large nominate several pieces that meet the requirements, leaving final selection up to the EC for the week. Each of us have our own idiosyncrasies, of course, and our own areas of interest can influence our choices. We do also take into account how many times our options have been nominated, and we pay attention to that additional level of interest as well as checking for comments (in the PressForward plugin) that explain why our guest editors nominated individual items. What results is a crowd-sourced, yet still curated, publication that feeds into JDH.

Recent changes to the DHNow site — in both the sections dedicated to the Editors-at-Large and the main content pages — will hopefully encourage our guest editors to engage more in the content selection process. It will be interesting to see if new editors (and returning participants) start to leave more comments or more feedback to provide us with a better understanding of how they are selecting content to nominate. The other reason behind the redesign, beyond helping out current editors, was to pull in more outside editors. The more participants we have, the more feeds are nominated to be added to the plugin, and the more exposure both we and our editors have to the ongoing conversations and arguments circulating within the DH community. By encouraging the creation of a more engaged community, we are also pushing for more interdisciplinary participation in the field, bringing scientists, librarians, archaeologists, archivists, historians, and others into a community whose make-up should result in bigger and better projects and perhaps, a more solid sense of a DH identity.