Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Joshua Piker The Forum that follows centers on Simon P. Newman's article "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica," which was published by the William and Mary Quarterly on the OI Reader app in June 2018. This essay represents the first born-digital article published on the OI Reader, and as such it is a significant milestone for the Quarterly. Newman's article will not appear in a print edition of the journal. Instead, it is freely available via the OI Reader. Anyone with an Apple or Android tablet or smartphone can go to the App Store or Google Play, download the OI Reader for free, and use the app to download the article. The OI Reader is an extraordinary resource for early American historians. It allows scholars working with maps, images, sound, computational data, and video to write articles in which source material of this sort can live within their articles—not shunted to a supplemental website, not buried in an appendix, not relegated to the endnotes. That ability expands the range of evidence scholars can present, which likewise expands the sorts of topics they can tackle and the types of arguments they can make in a persuasive and compelling fashion. And all of this occurs within a context in which authors know that their work will benefit from the journal's rigorous editorial process; readers know the articles published on the OI Reader have been both fully peer reviewed and professionally edited; and the publisher of the journal knows that the articles are presented in a form that conforms to the discipline's best practices in regard to stability, durability, citability, and discoverability. This Forum is intended to provide a venue for scholars with expertise in the history of slavery, the history of Jamaica, and digital history to discuss and evaluate both Newman's argument and the digital methods that he deploys. My hope is that the Forum will encourage conversation about digital approaches to our shared field of inquiry and our mutual project of expanding the quality, reach, and impact of our scholarship. The Forum will be published in all versions of the William and Mary Quarterly: print, Project Muse, JSTOR, and the OI Reader. [End Page 3] Copyright © 2019 Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture