By Shiraz Noorani, Graduate Student Researcher, Center for the Humanities, UC Merced
A comparative review between Reviews in Digital Humanities, The Public Historian, and The Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education suggests a fundamental shift in contemporary humanities publishing, one that transcends conventional humanities research and embraces a more collaborative, socially oriented, and publicly engaged form of knowledge production. Despite the different focus of each journal publication, the journals share a common endeavor to reconsider the nature of scholarly research, its authors, and its audience.
The Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education (JPSHE) is primarily interested in the pedagogical and institutional aspects of public engagement. Its articles emphasize the role of service learning, community-based research, and civic engagement in teaching. Reviewing JPSHE’s recent publications, it becomes clear that one of the key themes discussed in its articles is the ability of universities to go beyond their symbolic commitments to engage more deeply in public scholarship activities and incorporate public scholarship in teaching, academic rewards, and institutional priorities. The structure of JPSHE articles mirrors its goals: articles are relatively concise, readable, and action-oriented. Introductions often begin by identifying a gap between the stated public mission of higher education and its institutional realities, positioning community engagement as both a critique of traditional approaches and an alternative. As for methodology, JPSHE is predominantly based on case studies, participatory research, and reflective essays, focusing on actions rather than theories. In this way, JPSHE frames public scholarship as a transformative practice that reshapes both the classroom and the university itself.
The Public Historian adopts an approach to public engagement through the field of history, with a strong emphasis on applied, collaborative, and ethically grounded historical work. The journal has established itself as a significant voice in scholarship that seeks to combine academic research with practice in the public sphere. Not only is its range quite broad, covering areas like oral history, museum studies, historic preservation, and digital history, but it is interested in varied types of media, including exhibitions, films, and digital projects. In closely looking at articles from the last five years, a recurrent theme seems to be the practice of history as an ethical and political practice. In the journal, topics like slavery, racial violence, Indigenous histories, migration, and environmental crises are approached not as remote topics, but as living, contested conditions that call for ongoing critical engagement.
In terms of its structure, The Public Historian is somewhat traditional compared to JPSHE, featuring longer articles (approximately 10,000-12,000 words) with extended introductions. Nevertheless, the unique feature of its articles consists of their focus on a specific project in public history followed by reflections on it. Instead of emphasizing theoretical aspects, the journal examines theory applied to practice and discusses how the histories are constructed, mediated, and communicated to a public audience. For instance, the article on motion comics as an approach to digital public history clearly exemplifies this point as it covers all three stages of this process: a description of a problem, a discussion of narrative and visual methods, and finally the reflection on an audience reaction to a story. This structure highlights the journal’s commitment to understanding history not only as content but as a form of communication shaped by medium, audience, and context.
Reviews in Digital Humanities stands out as the most groundbreaking innovation within the area of academic publishing out of all three journals mentioned. Unlike the other two journals, Reviews in Digital Humanities does not publish research articles but focuses only on reviewing and assessing digital humanities projects. This is because the field needs better ways to evaluate the many digital works being produced, which often do not receive enough peer review or scholarly feedback. It also recognizes that scholarship is not limited to written work and includes other forms as well.
The most unique feature of this academic journal is its structure. Every issue of the journal usually contains two separate parts: the descriptions of the digital humanities projects by their authors and the review of those projects by an expert in the relevant sphere, thus creating a unique dialogic type of writing, different from the standard single-authored research paper. The articles are quite brief, containing about 500 words, and concentrated on analyzing the intellectual, practical, visual, and public aspects of a digital humanities project. Thematically, the journal organizes issues around key areas within digital humanities and digital pedagogy among others, indicating an ongoing discussion of such topics as representation, equity, and interdisciplinarity.
These journals emphasize that scholarship is not an isolated activity. Instead, they stress that it is important to collaborate, whether this means working between universities and community partners (JPSHE), historians and the public (The Public Historian), or scholars and digital humanities professionals (Reviews in Digital Humanities). Moreover, these journals share the same concern about the accessibility of the scholarship presented in them, which means not only employing easy-to-understand language but also making it accessible to non-academic audiences (in the case of Reviews in Digital Humanities and the Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education through open access). Finally, they all question the existing hierarchy of scholarly activities, as they appreciate those types of work which may have been previously considered marginal.
At the same time, their differences are just as important to understand. JPSHE is primarily concerned with transforming higher education institutions and pedagogical practices; The Public Historian focuses on the ethical and political dimensions of representing the past in public contexts; and Reviews in Digital Humanities redefines scholarship through its emphasis on digital production and evaluation.
The value of comparing such journals is due to the fact that, when put together, they exemplify a trend emerging in the area of the humanities. The emergence of these journals implies a departure from conventional practices in terms of knowledge generation into something broader and more socially responsible. Thus, by challenging academic borders in terms of both form and content, these journals not only broaden the scope of academic publication but also give new meaning to its very concept, allowing the humanities to become fully involved in contemporary life.
This is one in a series of five essays reviewing public humanities journals. This series was inspired by Wendy Belcher’s website Reviews of Peer-Reviewed Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences