In the latest News Net (May/June 2010, 50.3) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Scott Palmer’s “Academic Publishing in the Digital Age” surveys the current landscape of digital humanities: JSTOR, MUSE, the JSAH, the university presses and the “digital transition,” various e-book platforms and e-readers, including the Kindle and iPad. He examines the Institute for the Future of the Book, George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, Web 2 and 3 capabilities, the impact of mega-corporations like Microsoft, Apple and Google, and the efforts of government and private foundations, including NEH, MacArthur, Mellon and ACLS. Among the “impressive” multimedia projects he cites is ACLS Humanities E-Book’s XML series.
Prof. Palmer then devotes many of his final remarks to the importance of a new digital literacy among humanists themselves and the opportunities and challenges that this new fluency carry for the academy. “We should be prepared to be buffeted by continuing whirlwinds of change,” he concludes.
Scott Palmer comes to the topic with first-hand knowledge and experience: he is the author of HEB’s XML multimedia version of Dictatorship of the Air (Cambridge UP, HEB e-book, 2007) and now serves as editor-in-chief of The Russian Front website.
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