Scrollership:  a new name for some new ways of writing

1. Abstract

While digital humanities projects have developed a vibrantly broad vocabulary of new forms of presentation for data, a relatively impoverished default idea of scholarship as books and articles maintains a strong hold even here. I argue that this is a bad thing; and that many of the pieces are in place for a form of a long-form scholarly communication that better takes advantage of the possibilities for interaction using Javascript and data storage on web servers.

In homage to the slightly inane but undeniably catchy term "scrollytelling" that has come to capture much digital media practice, I dub a humanities counterpart "scrollership," and identify the ways that humanistic interactive argumentation can build on models created for journalism, the sciences, and the social science. While reproducible research and interactive publications are often thought of as two different things, in the Digital Humanities, they can better be conceived of as paired goals.