Digital Defoe is a peer-reviewed online journal, available in full on the free web, that brings together traditional academic forms such as the scholarly essay with digital projects and innovative pedagogical materials. Published yearly since 2009 by Illinois State University, the journal focuses on the works of Daniel Defoe, but also fosters discussion of eighteenth-century literature and culture more broadly. It offers a promising new collaborative space for conversations about reading and teaching the eighteenth century. 

 
Editors Katherine Ellison and Holly Faith Nelson provide a helpful overview of their project in “Defoe 2.0: An Editorial Introduction”. Their myriad aims break down roughly into three overarching goals. First, the journal seeks to publish work in a variety of genres. In addition to the usual articles, reviews, abstracts and notes, Digital Defoe provides rigorous peer review for forms that currently receive little attention in traditional academic journals, such as digital projects “that demand evaluation and response that is also multimodal.” The second goal is to attract audiences and authors who might not ordinarily participate in scholarly discourse. The editors hope to reach new readerships not only by publishing in a variety of genres and by inviting contributions from students and first-time readers of Defoe, but more importantly, by offering the journal free of charge. This allows it to be accessible by academics, teachers, and others who are not affiliated with a university with a large subscription budget. Thirdly, the editors put a focus on the use of research in the classroom by publishing essays on pedagogy and teaching materials.

The editors draw a common thread between their goals by arguing that their larger project is about mediation—between print and the digital, between students and teachers, between higher and secondary educators, and between scholars of eighteenth-century texts and readers encountering them for the first time. The more fundamental project of Digital Defoe, however, seems to be the creation of a new discursive space that brings the resources and rigor of academic publishing and the editors’ enthusiasm for the eighteenth century to a wider, more diverse audience. Although online publishing is uniquely suitable for digital, multimodal, and hypertextual projects, many of the materials published in this journal could work as articles in a traditional print journal. It is the web’s ability to make information widely accessible, rather than its technological potential, that ultimately matters most for Digital Defoe. While Ellison and Nelson position their journal as “an extension of the physical spaces of university offices, libraries, and hotel conference rooms,” this description downplays its departure from the standard model of academic publishing. By putting their journal on the free web, they make it available to people who would not be in those offices, libraries, and conference rooms. One project that came out of the conference context, yet holds relevance for a wider audience, is “Teaching the Eighteenth Century: A Series of Poster Presentations,” part of issue 3.1 (Fall 2011). As John R. Iverson and Diane Duffrin Kelley explain in their introduction, the project stems from the poster sessions they have organized each year since 2009 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. They report that this mode of presentation, less formal than delivering a talk, has fostered lively conversations. In order to share some of the experience of the session, they collect eight examples in this online gallery. The “posters” range widely in format. Many are reflective essays on courses taught by the authors, supplemented by assignment prompts, images from the course, or samples of student work. Another poster is a selection of digital collages developed to aid students, while yet another presents research findings on students’ perceptions of the usefulness of a French literature course for developing linguistic proficiency.

In some ways, the journal’s format reveals the difficulty of transitioning between the format of a print journal and that of an online-only journal. Although the website has some nice user features—for example, articles are available for viewing in both HTML and PDF formats—its navigation could be more intuitive. In the case of the collection of poster sessions, the page for each poster does not include links to the other posters. Adding links to the other posters on each page of the collection would make it easier for readers to experience the project as a whole, without the use of the browser’s “back” button. Similarly, the submission guidelines and current CFP might be combined into a single page or at least linked to one another. Finally, in their introduction the editors envision that authors could respond to readers’ comments in blogs that would accompany each item. While this feature does not yet appear to have been implemented, the addition of some kind of feedback mechanism would take advantage of the immediacy of the internet, while promoting still further conversation between the diverse members of the academic community this journal seeks to reach. Making the website more intuitive and easy-to-use is important if Digital Defoe wishes to appeal to readers who are accustomed to the polish of print journals and professionally-designed websites alike.

While the editors can improve the website’s functionality and provide admirable guiding principles, the journal is ultimately dependent upon the participation of the intellectual community. The current CFP requests that readers “circulate this CFP to your undergraduate and graduate students, to educators you know in secondary and primary education, and to independent scholars,” suggesting that the current base of readers and contributor—unlike the target base—is made up almost exclusively of college and university professors. The success of Digital Defoe hinges on its ability to reach other audiences, because that commitment is what makes it stand out. Numerous models, both free-access and subscription-based, already exist for what online scholarship can be: digital versions of print journals, online-only journals, print journals with web-only content, digitized archives, wikis, collaborative translation and editing projects, and the like. Digital Defoe’s unique contribution is its commitment to open up academic discourse to wider audiences, not only by making its content free but by publishing in forms that appeal to students, independent scholars, and educators in a variety of institutional contexts. It can realize this goal if we as a community recognize the ability of the web, not only to enable digital scholarship and lower publishing costs, but to create new discursive spaces.