Dear Editors,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thank you for allowing us time to revise our manuscript\nbased on the feedback of our three readers and our many open commenters. While\nthis experiment in open review proved to be far more editorial work for you\u2014and\nuncompensated work at that!\u2014we are extremely pleased that the AHR <\/em>was\nwilling to give it a shot and we hope, based on the revisions we made, that we\ncan follow this process through to publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are pleased to note that all readers and commenters clearly\nidentified and correctly articulated our arguments and interventions. There\nwere no substantial misinterpretations of our claims and, overall, reviewers\nrecognized the utility of a critical exploration of the short history of\ndigital history through the lens of \u201cdemocratization.\u201d That said, the three\nanonymous readers reports as well as the eighty-eight comments from seventeen\nscholars presented many opportunities for improvement. We are deeply grateful\nfor all who participated in this review and for the AHR<\/em>, particularly\nAlex Lichtenstein and Lara Putnam, for making this possible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As you suggested, we focused especially on areas where\nreaders converged by explicitly defining terms (democracy, digital history and\nhumanities, OA and OER), clearly explaining the relationship between digital\nhistory and digital humanities, clarifying the scope of \u201cdemocracy\u201d in our\narticle, and engaging more with the production side of open access materials. We\nhave also benefited from the many suggested readings, such as Sharon Leon\u2019s\n\u201cComplicating a \u2018Great Man\u2019 Narrative,\u201d and have more fully fleshed out the ins\nand outs of the past several years of digital history, capturing\u2014explicitly\u2014the\ntensions we introduce here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following is a more detailed description of the changes\nwe made in response to comments from the three anonymous readers and the\nseventeen additional scholars who offered feedback. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reader 1 suggested we better grapple with gender and ensure\nthat women and people of color are not just \u201cincluded\u201d in our essay but central\nto our argument. We added considerations of several digital humanists and\nexpanded upon existing material to better feature relevant scholarship (such as\nSharon Leon\u2019s) and to show explicitly how scholars, inspired especially by\nintersectional feminism, are responsible for exposing the tensions and pushing\nthe new forms of \u201cdemocracy\u201d we have made central to our argument. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reader 3, Cameron Blevins, Jordan Taylor, and Trevor Owens\nall asked for clarity on the relationship between the digital humanities and\ndigital history. We have added an explicit definitional paragraph to the\nintroduction that treats digital history and the digital humanities as well as open\naccess and open educational resources, a request made by Reader 3, Martin Paul\nEve, Nora Slonimsky, Trever Owens, Lisa Spiro, Dan Gorman, and Jordan\nTaylor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reader 3, Cameron Blevins, and Jordan Taylor call for more\nengagement with digital public history. We considerably expanded the discussion\nof the work of museums, archives, and digital public historians, noting Sharon\nLeon\u2019s demonstration of the prominence of public history work in winning NEH\ndigital history grants and evaluating the successes and limitations of digital\npublic history in pursuing democratization against a backdrop of a host of\nentrenched inequalities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reader 2, Nora Slonimsky, Lisa Spiro, Jordan Taylor, Trevor\nOwens, and Alex Lichtenstein’s own editorial comment all pointed to a greater\nneed to grapple with the labor and economics of the digital humanities and open\naccess. While Reader 2 was especially engaged in the economics of open access\npublishing, particularly with the model used in the sciences, and although ours\nis not to propose a solution to the economic problems posed by open access, we\ndid attempt to more clearly chart the nature of those problems. We are less\noptimistic that open access can achieve all Reader 2 believes it can, and we\nbelieve the sacrifices Reader 2 suggest are not so easily waved away, and we\ntherefore see the movement, even in its best manifestations, as less than \u201ca\nrevolution in historical scholarship.\u201d We have sought to chart both the\nachievements and limitations of open access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reader 2, Reader 3, Lisa Spiro, Martin Paul Eve, Nora\nSlonimsky, Trevor Owens, Mark Boonshoft, Lindsay Chervinsky, and Randall Miller\nall wanted greater clarity on our understanding of democracy. Reader 2\ndescribes democracy as the efficient, transparent, and equitable use of public\nresources for the public good, and this report demonstrates a careful call for\naction at reforming publishing toward these ends. We are less willing to offer\nour own positive definition of democracy and note the limitations of scholars\nwho attempt to do so. But we make that explicit, and we further define and\nevaluate the specific ways that digital historians have understood and pursued\ndemocratization through three tactics: opening access, expanding participation,\nand attacking inequalities. We chart the achievements and limitations to each\nof these three approaches. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reader 2, Mark Boonshoft, Christy Hyman, Cameron Blevins,\nDan Gorman, Lisa Spiro, Nora Slonimsky, and Trevor Owens all call for more\nnuanced yet clear articulations of neoliberalism and its role in shaping\ndigital history. We have expanded our brief history of neoliberalism, drawing\non the scholarship of Johann Neem, Wendy Brown, Christopher Newfield, and\nothers. Unlike critiques grounded in digital literary studies, our goal is not\nto argue that digital history or the digital humanities is a tool for\nneoliberalism, but rather to show how the structures of neoliberalism hamper\nthe democratizing potential of digital history in universities, museums,\narchives, and beyond. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reader 1, Reader 3, Jordan Taylor, Cameron Blevins, Martin\nPaul Eve, Christy Hyman, and Nora Slonimsky all asked us to reckon with\nadditional sources\u2014both articles and digital projects. We are very grateful for\nthese calls and believe that this draft much more accurately samples from the\nfield, particularly highlighting the role of women and BIPOC in producing\ndiscursive scholarship and in creating digital projects that aim to redress\ninequality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reader 3, Lisa Spiro, Jordan Taylor, Trevor Owens, and\nCameron Blevins all pointed to moments of imprecise or exaggerated language. We\nare grateful for this attentive reading and have tried to more accurately\nreflect the complex realities of the issues under discussion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One again, we deeply thank the readers and the AHR<\/em>\nfor facilitating the process. We believe it has only strengthened our piece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Editors, Thank you for allowing us time to revise our manuscript based on the feedback of our three readers and our many open commenters. While this experiment in open review proved to be far more editorial work for you\u2014and uncompensated work at that!\u2014we are extremely pleased that the AHR was willing to give it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-117","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118,"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/117\/revisions\/118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ahropenreview.com\/HistoryCanBeOpenSource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}