Digital publication - the available options

Paper given at Record Society Publishin

Open Access Publishing

Paper given at Record Society Publishin

'Reviews in History' and peer review in the digital age

This paper discusses the development of the IHR's open access reviews journal, Reviews in History, and goes on to consider some of the ways in which peer review, both pre- and post-publication, might evolve in the coming months and years. It was given at a conference held to mark the launch of a new open-access reviews platform, recensio.net

Approaches to digital editing

This paper discusses approaches to digital editing, focusing on two projects, ReScript and Early English Laws (http://www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk). It also touches on some of the other tools available to editors, for example those offered as part of TextGrid. ReScript, a project of the Institute of Historical Research, aims to develop a prototype editing facility, which will support collaboration within established editorial teams as well as a crowdsourced approach to producing editions. It is currently being trialled with texts at a range of stages of production, from ‘completed’ 19th-century editions which will benefit from correction and annotation to completely new works. Early English Laws aims to publish online new editions and translations of all English legal codes, edicts and treatises produced up to and including Magna Carta in 1215. A bespoke editing facility has been developed by the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London which, like ReScript, will support collaborative editing, as well as export to print where appropriate. The latter project is particularly complex as it has to accommodate a variety of languages and editorial approaches (scholars working on early English texts, for example, have very different requirements from those working with Latin documents). The tools developed by both of these projects will be made available in due course for use and adaptation by and for other projects. The paper was given at the 'Envisioning REED in the digital age' workshop organised by the Records of Early English Drama project, University of Toronto, 4-5 April 2011

The Botswana Bushmen’s Fight for Water and Land Rights in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve

The Botswana Bushmen live in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in the center of Botswana. The area is known to be one of the most rugged, arid landscapes on the face of the planet. In recent years, due to claims from the Botswana government that the Bushmen needed to ‘develop’, extreme efforts have been made to force the Bushmen from the reserve originally allotted to them in the 1960s

Negotiating the archives of UK web space

The archived Web is an enormously rich primary source for the study of the recent past, yet it remains unappreciated and underexploited even by contemporary historians. This chapter examines why this should be the case, and argues that it is now critical for historians to begin to engage with Web archives. It explores the changing relationship between archivists, librarians and historians, which is beginning to break down researchers’ reluctance to work with born-digital materials at scale. It concludes by proposing an exciting future for (digital) historical research, which employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to recover the lives and voices of ordinary people