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29.1 - New Media

Special Issue
HSR Vol. 29 (2004) No. 1: Special Issue: New Media

Katja Mruck & Gudrun Gersmann (Eds.): New Media in the Humanities. Electronic Publishing and Open Access: Current State and Future Perspectives

 

Up until several years ago, new media still had a rather exotic character in the disciplines of social sciences, humanities and cultural studies. Although many historians were already working with computers in the 1980s and 1990s, and the pioneers of historical information processing were already working with databases and complex applications, there still remained an overall skepticism in regard to data processing in the field. Thankfully, this attitude towards new media has greatly changed in the last years, and it is with the contributions in this HSR Special Issue that we would like to survey the importance of this new media in the social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies. We have approached this topic broadly in scope on purpose in order to highlight different aspects of (open access) electronic publishing; while we assess the future possibilities of electronic publishing, we also remain critical of issues open access often brings to the fore, such as in the matter of copyright, for instance.