Resource of the Month
Our first resource highlight will take a closer look at what H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online (H-Net) has to offer. This interdisciplinary forum for scholars in the humanities and social sciences is extensive, and continually growing, but once we’ve signed up for particular networks in our field, we often forget to look around this site as a whole for new groups and services that might be useful academically and professionally.
The Home Page
The H-Net home page posts updates and links to other pages on the larger network, and also publishes Horizons, which highlights new groups that have recently appeared on the network. H-Net has over 200 networks, each with different topics, purposes and audiences, and the list grows continually. This newsletter makes it easy to discover what new sites and services H-Net is providing.
An example of five new networks this year are highlighted in the recent edition of Horizons
- H-Music is devoted to closing the gap between the role that music has played (and continues to play) in history and the role it plays in most mainstream historical scholarship.
- H-Nahuatl focuses on the Aztec language of Nahuatl and the Nahua culture.
- H-SHERA brings together historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian art and architecture, highlights events and announcements related to this region, and reviews recent books in the field.
- H-Celebration brings together scholars in the fields of Celebration Studies, Festival Studies, and Holiday Studies, offering a fertile place and digital tools for this growing field. The network is compiling a series of image-based studies of celebrations, starting with striking image essays of the Phuket Vegetarian Festival and New Orleans Mardi Gras Walking Clubs.
- H-Diplo commissions essays, roundtables, and reviews on diplomatic history and international affairs. Since January, H-Diplo has been publishing two essays per week in its ISSF Policy Series on America and the World - 2017 and Beyond. Edited by Robert Jervis, Francis Gavin, Joshua Rovner, and Diane Labrosse, these commissioned pieces tackle questions surrounding the election of President Donald J. Trump from the perspective of diplomatic history and international relations theory, and allow scholars to reflect upon the state of international relations and America's role in the world.
Finding networks in your field of interest
The Networks page contains a list of general topics: within those are other related sites. Many of the sites are cross listed, so for example, H-Albion appears in “British Studies” as well as “Atlantic History.”
If you want to receive postings from those particular sites, you can subscribe to the page and sign up for emails which contain the new posts on that site. Note; you can change how you receive these emails- if you don’t go into your subscriber preferences for notifications and choose “daily digest,” you’ll receive individual postings, rather than all the posts for the day grouped in one email.
Posting a discussion topic or inquiry
You can only post on a network you are subscribed to. This link takes you to a video tutorial on how to post a discussion on a site: https://networks.h-net.org/video-tutorial-how-post-discussion.
Putting that degree to work
H-Net provides a page of job listings, which include faculty, teaching and postdoctoral fellowships. If you select “Browse Job Postings” on the menu, the jobs can be sorted by date or specialty.
Announcements and events in your area of study
H-Net Reviews lists reviews of print, conferences, exhibits, websites and more, and is sortable by date, list (network), type and author.
H-Announce is a moderated one-way distribution network for announcing events, upcoming conferences call for papers, calls for publication, programs, workshops, sources of funding, fellowships, and news from H-Net and its affiliates. Below is their posting schedule, but by using the search engine, older announcements are always available. While H-Announce is the main source for announcements, individual networks also post calls for papers, events, funding opportunities and upcoming events that are submitted directly to that network. Therefore, to perform a comprehensive search, its wise to check both your networks and H-Announce.
Monday: Jobs & Reviews Digests; Funding; CFPs
Tuesday: Events; Opportunities for Advanced Studies
Wednesday: CFPs; Journals; Online Digital Resources
Thursday: Events; Opportunities for Advanced Studies
Friday: CFPs; Call for Volunteers
Finding Funding using H-Announce
To find funding opportunities, go to the H-Announce page and type “funding” in the "search H-Announce" box at the top right. This takes you to a page where you are able to search by fellowships, grants, or prizes. As awards can be listed differently by the awarding institution, its wise to look under all these categories. Additionally, the awards can be sorted by date, country and a number of other specifics.
Keeping up with the literature in your field
The H-Net Book Channel is a new book announcement service from H-Net. It provides a valuable resource for keeping abreast of the literature in specific academic disciplines. A great feature is the ability to search by topic; for example, if you search for “British and Irish” studies, you will find more book reviews than appear on the H-Albion network alone.
“Structured as a network on the H-Net Commons, the Book Channel publishes automatically updating lists of new books in a variety of scholarly categories. A work in progress, we are continually importing new publisher catalogs to help readers stay informed. Visit daily to find new lists of recently published academic titles sorted by discipline. In Spring 2016, Book Channel will feature editorial content that will add scholarly perspectives to new book announcements. Commissioned essays, contributions from networks, syllabus modules, and other short-form scholarly and teaching-related content will contextualize new directions in academic research and publishing and connect them to larger public conversations.”
#Finding help for specific questions in your field
H-Net has a very active Twitter feed. One feature I particularly like is #HelpAScholar which provides a way to ask direct questions about research.
Examples of recent posts:#HelpAScholar find information on African-American Voters in NJ Under the 1776 State Constitution#HelpaScholar with Reading/Organizational Suggestions for Gender in a Southern History course
Other network resources
It’s a good idea to periodically poke around network pages you are subscribed to- groups are continually updating and adding to their pages. H-Grad is an example- we recently configured our Resource pages to provide links to writing, teaching and digital humanities. In doing so, we discovered a number of wonderful teaching links on other pages that we cross referenced as subject specific matter.
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