Digital Humanities Centres (DHCs) are a crucial part of the Digital Humanities (DH) community, providing support in digital scholarship and scholarly communication. These centres are typically located at (university) libraries and have strong web presences. This paper was written in connection to an internship at KU Leuven’s Artes Libraries with the aim of providing useful insights reflecting standard practice to set up this web presence for KU Leuven’s own DHC: the DH Commons. The paper itself focussed on the use of DHC blogs as a form of scholarly communication. While studies on academic blogs have already been done, few have focussed on blogs not written by individual researchers let alone on such collaborative efforts as DHC blogs.
The research was conducted as a case study combined with document review and content analysis methods to examine a corpus of five American DHC websites and blogs, all affiliated to a public university’s library. These criteria provided a situation similar to that of the DH Commons, yet in a country where DH and DHCs have a longer, better-established tradition. The corpus analysis focussed primarily on the content of the DHC blog pages. Results of this analysis show trends in the type of content these pages provided (e.g. research coverage, events announcements, etc.). Thus, demonstrating that – despite academics’ hesitance at accepting blogs as mainstream forms of scholarly communication – these blogs offer the kind of dissemination of academic discourse typically expected from other (more accepted) forms of scholarly communication.