Reviews of Online Resources: Call for DM 6

This is a call for contributions for the next issue of the Digital Medievalist journal (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/). As we all know, there are now many scholarly resources which have been published online as websites but which have never been reviewed as scholarly publications. This is a problem both for us as practitioners and for the discipline in general, not least because it can imply that these publications are somehow less scholarly. Furthermore, the career of academics and research departments often depends on having reviewed publications, as a result of which many online publications are inadmissible for tenure, research assessment and the like.

This problem is being addressed by bodies such as the MLA, but still there are relatively few reviews being written. To help encourage this process, the editors at DM have decided to take action and will include as many of these reviews as we can manage in our next issue (and thereafter). We therefore ask (a) for suggestions of resources that should be reviewed, and (b) offers from reviewers. Of course the ideal is to offer both a resource and a review.
As usual, reviews should be approximately 1,500 words and should consider the publication both from the ‘digital’ and ‘medieval/humanities’ standpoints. We are interested primarily in projects on medieval topics, but as always we are open to anything of interest to medievalists. See the journal’s Submission Guidelines for further details (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/1.1/submission/).

Please note also that we are thinking specifically of freely available online publications, not printed books, CD-ROM publications or subscription-only resources (although we will of course still consider reviews of these as usual). In particular, this means that we cannot promise reviewers copies of the publication being reviewed, or access to subscription-only sites.

Thanks, and we look forward to your suggestions,

The Editors, Digital Medievalist
editors@digitalmedievalist.org

Digital Medievalist is an international web-based Community of Practice for medievalists working with digital media (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/). Our on-line, refereed Journal accepts work of original research and scholarship, notes on technological topics (markup and stylesheets, tools and software, etc.), commentary pieces discussing developments in the field, bibliographic and review articles, and project reports.