Once a digital publication is ready for release, what issues surround it and how do they affect reception and use? What are the mechanisms in place for prepublication and postpublication peer review of digital projects? How are digital projects used by other scholars? What are the various and possible criteria for evaluating digital scholarship? Do digital projects count? For what and to whom? Must digital projects be scalable and replicable? Should they be interoperable with other scholarship? How is a project connected to the humanities community through the digital tools that the community uses: forums, blogs, wikis, listservs and so forth?

The meaning of publication and its forms have changed considerably over the past five hundred years and continue to do so. In the two hundred years that separate Petrarch and his first conscious attempts to define a new humanist movement and Desiderius Erasmus, who took full advantage of the new technology of the printing press, most humanists chose to publish in a few set forms. These ranged from the letter, closely modeled on classical examples most especially those of Cicero, where the communication sent from one scholar to another was both a private and a very public matter; to the edition of classical texts (secular and religious) culled from manuscripts in monastic and princely libraries; to the treatise – whether on education and manners, arms or architecture. Great works of history based on classical forms raised Renaissance historiography from the chronicle and its sequential recording of events to new thematic and interpretative formulations. By that time, Erasmus, Thomas More and other Renaissance humanists were writing for a print audience, and they had amplified these forms to include more popular alternatives, including the dialog, satire and essay. In the hands of writers like Erasmus and Montaigne, the essay became one of the chief media of political, religious and philosophical thought.