Scholars of the ancient world have been at the forefront of digital humanities from the very beginning. We have all profited from their investment in creating the resources that we rely on every day, and in building the communities and infrastructures that guarantee these resources’ success into the future.

And yet, scholarship carried out in the digital sphere remains undervalued. This labour and creativity can be invisible in the discipline as a whole. Digital Classicists, like colleagues across the Humanities, report how difficult it is to have their investment of skill, expertise, and time recognised and rewarded when what they create does not take the form of a traditional publication.

The editorial team of Classical Review has been thinking about how this journal could address this issue. We recognise that published reviews are important markers of esteem in our field, and that our focus on books as the central mode of research perpetuates a structural disadvantage in conventional metrics. In 2022 we pioneered the open-access “Profiles” series which survey research activity across a chosen subfield. So, Colin Elliott highlighted digitisation as an important aspect of his profile on the Roman Economy, and appearing in late January will be a profile of Digital Space by E. Barker, S. Gordin and C. Palladino.

From 2024 we will widen the remit of Classical Review to include also reviews of digital projects related to the ancient Mediterranean world or its reception. We hope that these will be of use to scholars working with digital methods, and also to the field in general in that they could provide visibility for digital projects, prompt collaboration, and explain the benefits of research carried out in the digital sphere.

We are thus launching a call for projects to be reviewed. To be eligible, the project must engage with some aspect of the ancient Mediterranean world and its reception. Projects may consist of new research whose primary mode of communication is in a digital format, a digital tool built to assist analytical work, or digital repositories of primary material. Projects may be at any stage of maturity, but must be substantial enough to warrant review. Projects which are essentially book-like or journal-like in form, but published online, will not be eligible for review within this initiative.

Requests for review should come from someone closely associated with the project. This request should include:
(1) Basic information about the project, including title; url; names of creators, directors or major contributors; availability (e.g. open-access, paid subscription etc); licensing (e.g. CC-BY)
(2) A 300-word statement on the aims and achievements of the project and its current state of maturity
(3) Links to any necessary supplementary material or pdfs of research articles produced by the project
(4) A list of people closely associated with the development of the project.

Please send this material to Clare Roberts at classicalreview@classicalassociation.org.
This is a rolling call; there is no deadline for requests for review. The editors cannot guarantee that all requests will result in a published review, but where reviews are undertaken, they will typically appear within 6 to 9 months.

Given the diversity of digital projects in our field and the fact that the projects reviewed will differ in terms of their scale, ambition, and level of maturity, reviewers will have wide scope in deciding which aspects they focus on. In general, we hope that these reviews will both offer an assessment of the resource and an indication of how it can be used by others. Reviewers should be guided by the statement on the aims and achievements provided in the request, but are not bound to only consider the project within this framework. Reviews should offer an overview of the digital resource, an indication of its intended audience and assessment of its usefulness in that context, an analysis of its place within the intellectual conversation, and its contributions to the intellectual development of the field. Reviewers may also choose to comment on technical innovations and shortcomings. Reviews of digital projects will typically be 1300 words long and completed within 3 months.

Anyone who would like to volunteer to review digital projects for Classical Review should approach Greta Hawes at gretahawes@classicalassociation.org.