Almost a year ago, Gary Hall a theorist, writer and experimental publisher, working in the areas of new media, philosophy, art and politics, and Professor of Media and Performing Arts in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, as well as Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, UK reached out to me, in my role of editor as the Journal of Electronic Publishing, to propose a special issue to be based on the Disrupting the Humanities seminar at Coventry University.

In Gary’s words:

The issue as we are currently conceiving it would have a dual focus. It would examine the Humanities scholarly tradition critically and creatively as a way of looking toward a more "open", alternative and affirmative future for the Humanities - one in which the Humanities are capable of bringing certain aspects of their own humanist legacy into question (ideas of the university, the book, the journal article, the conference presentation, fixity, the finished object and so on).

But the Disrupting the Humanities issue would also endeavor to itself act as an example of just such a future for the Humanities. It would do so not least through the experimental form of electronic publishing its contents exemplify, in that they will consist of specially edited and annotated hybrid video pieces.

For this publisher, Professor Hall's proposal was editorial catnip. I have been following Professor Hall’s work for several years, most closely through our mutual engagement with The Open Humanities Press. I have admired that work and always found it insightful and thought provoking, and on that basis alone would have been inclined to try to realize the vision of this issue. Add to that my own intellectual background as literary scholar who came of disciplinary age in the nineteen eighties era of high critical theory and then mix in articles with titles like At Risk? The Humanities and the Future of Academic Publishing and The Post-Digital Publishing Archive: An Inventory of Speculative Strategies (to name just two of the extraordinary pieces of work published here). I immediately pounced upon this proffered partnership and began working with Gary and his co-producer Janneke Adema as well as my own able Managing Editor, Jonathan McGlone, to ambitiously realize the visions of "Disrupting the Humanities."

I am pleased to have supported this project and brought it to publication, but can not take editorial credit for this impressive collection of work. All that credit goes to Gary Hall and Janneke Adema, and I particularly recommend to you their insightful and elegantly argued introduction, Posthumanities: The Dark Side of "The Dark Side of the Digital".

Indeed, as a publisher, humanist and passionate reader of texts in all their forms, I recommend to you all of the work published here, and extend my thanks to Gary and Janneke for their willingness to work with The Journal of Electronic Publishing.