How difficult is it for historians to publish work in digital
form? This was the question posed by Rachel Ensign in her
Chronicle article today. While an American survey of 4000
historians found most wanted to include interactive maps or
databases in their work the publishers of journal were far less
enthusiastic. According to Ensign the system of peer review and
printed journals has not embraced digital-born work and instead
much of this work makes it way into blogs or Wikipedia. In my
experience a lot of the work appearing in this form also appears
with poor footnoting and references, often not helped by the
technical limitations of the software used to create this work.
About 20 percent of scholars in the survey, conducted by Robert
Townsend, assistant director of research and publications at the
American Historical Association, said they had published work in
a native digital form. One of the projects mentioned in the
article by Doug Seefeldt, pointed to new digital scholarship
which works in ways paper c