1 September 2017
Welcome to the new HNA website! As you’ve no doubt noticed, we have redesigned and rebranded the websites for HNA and JHNA, and added HNAR, giving new prominence to the HNA Review of Books. The sites now have a greater visual correspondence with each other, without compromising the necessary independence of the Journal. The revised website also enables new functionalities that will keep our organization at the forefront of innovation among scholarly societies.
The new structure for the HNA website has a more efficient and individualized login and member profile pages.
* For existing members logging in to the members area for the first time, please click on “lost password” then enter your email address. More details can be found in the announcement of the new websites.
New memberships and renewals will be processed instantly via credit card. Now, rather than relying on remembering a universal password, members can select their own passwords. Moreover, you can customize your own profile page to show various types of information about your interests, or link to an external website at your institution, academia.edu, CODART, or a personal project. There is also a new forum message board for members. We hope that our community is strengthened by this new venue for conversations and scholarly exchanges. As this is a new adventure, we must build a culture that makes it comfortable and commonplace to read and contribute to the conversations on the forum. Please check it out!
All of the previous resources that were on the old HNA website are still here, with one notable change coming in the near future: we are discontinuing production of the HNA Newsletter after the 2017 November issue. Old issues are archived and available on the website. Older book reviews, once restricted to members only, are now open-access on HNAR and can be browsed altogether, by our traditional chronological/geographic categories, or searched by keyword. For our members, HNAR has additional references like the bibliography of recent articles, new book titles, and the recent dissertations list. If you have new information to add to ours, please contact us. I thank Kristin Belkin for her continuing leadership as administrative editor for HNAR. She is retiring as our HNA administrator after being the face of HNA and source of institutional memory for many, many years. We will miss her tremendously in that capacity. We are now searching for a new administrator/webmaster.
The new capabilities for the JHNA are especially exciting. We have a venue that can not only accommodate, but actually promote new directions of research in digital humanities. When JHNA began in 2008 as a fully open-access, peer-reviewed, online-only publication, it was one of very few such scholarly publications in art history. The landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade, and we are now taking full advantage of visual dialogues communicated online that are beyond the reach of print media. While pdf files of the articles will still be accessible, the Journal has great capability for expanded visual imagery. See the Editors’ Greeting to the new issue (vol. 9.2) for more information about these exciting upgrades.
None of this would have been possible without a lot of hard work. The members of our website committee, Alison Kettering, Martha Hollander, Heidi Eyestone and myself, explored options and labored for about two years to bring this project from fantasy to a reality. I would also like to thank students from Carleton College who helped with the JHNA material, and my daughter, Angela Crenshaw, a student at the University of St. Andrews, who greatly assisted with the migration of the content from the old HNA website to the new HNA and HNAR. Feedback from the HNA board has been valuable at each stage of the process. Alison, Heidi and Jacquelyn Coutré were instrumental in securing a generous grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and we supplemented that with funds from the HNA endowment. Jonathan Bumas designed our graceful new logos. Studio Rainwater of Providence, RI, was our expert guide for the website. Sarah Rainwater and her team of web developer Morgan Schwartz and designer Danikqwa Rembert produced an elegant overarching design and effortless functionality. We hope you agree!
HNA has not conducted a concerted fund-raising campaign in more than a decade. The officers and board members over the years have been conservative stewards of our endowment and annual budgets, but the organization is larger than ever (with more than 450 active members and nearly 800 overall), and costs for venues, events, and basic administrative functions are continually rising. There is more competition for the HNA Fellowship, and we find that we can never fully support all of the worthy applications we receive. We are trying to do more for our members on a thin budget, and this website is a large step. We ask that you consider rejoining at a higher membership level next year, or making an extra tax-deductible donation to our organization. The magnanimity of our membership has been great in the past, and we trust that our efforts have rewarded it. We hope that generous spirit continues. Please offer us your feedback, either directly and confidentially or communally on our message board, and I look forward to seeing you all at our reception at the College Art Association Annual Conference in February, at the HNA Conference in Ghent next May, or at some other event in the near future.
Sincerely,
Paul Crenshaw
Providence College
HNA President
president@hnanews.org