2. Publishing in the Digital Humanities

This chapter explores the discrepancy between the communication opportunities offered by new scholarly outputs and the strong adherence to traditional, formal publications. The authors view the digital humanities as not just a divergent scholarly field but also a disruptive one in which publication practices diverge less from traditional practices than expected of a community increasingly grounded in online values. Four functions of formal publishing that embody fundamental academic values are identified: registration, certification, dissemination, and archiving. This framework is used to analyse the inherent properties of the new digital medium and how they are destabilising paper-based conventions. From the perspective of a scholarly author as a primary stakeholder, this article argues that the limited evolution of scholarly communication in the digital humanities is a result of the intertwining of the values of scholarship and the functions of traditional publishing.