Prospectus for a New ADHO Electronic Journal

Rationale

A open-access electronic journal has been an important part of the ADHO planning process since its inception. The digital humanities community works digitally and needs a digital publication venue in order to experiment with innovative publication methods, and to adequately showcase digital research. The community also needs a way to make its research and ideas more visible to the outside world: both to help attract those who might join the field, and to build connections with researchers working in related areas.

The ADHO Publications Committee proposes to launch a free electronic journal in 2005-2006, to be conducted on the following principles:

Peer review: All scholarly articles will be peer reviewed; all other materials will be reviewed by the editors.

Experimentation: The journal will explore the use of new and experimental genres and modes of publication, while remaining centrally a journal.

Cultivation of the field: The journal editors will encourage and mentor new authors, and will work closely with the editors of LLC to increase the total quantity and quality of publication in digital humanities.

Multilinguality: The journal will publish articles in multiple languages, with an abstract in English, and will work with authors to publish an abstract in at least one other langage for all English-language articles. ADHO will seek and cultivate sources of funding to support multilingual publication and translation and will experiment with models for community translation.

Publication Structure

The journal will include several distinct thematic areas which encourage a variety of readers and interactions.

Articles

The core content of the journal is peer-reviewed articles in the major areas of digital humanities. These include, to start with: markup, new media, humanities computing, digital libraries, hypertext, corpus linguistics, game studies, and digital pedagogy. Because this is an online journal, serving a community that already has at least two print journals (LLC and Text Technology), this journal places special emphasis on articles which could not be published in the print journals: articles with a significant multimedia component, articles that rely on color illustration, articles that make rhetorical use of the electronic medium (e.g. through use of links, dynamic content, user interaction), and other similar uses of the electronic medium. The editors will work in concert with the editors of LLC to identify material that would be appropriate, and may also identify articles for co-publication between the two journals: for instance, an article whose main argument can be presented in print, but which is accompanied by a multimedia component to be published online.

To be appropriate for inclusion, articles must meet the same high scholarly standard of a print journal, and will be peer reviewed (see below).

Editorials

A second key strand of the journal will be an editorial section tentatively entitled "Issues in Humanities Computing". This section will include articles by its editor and articles commissioned or solicited for the section. The aim of this section would be to stimulate discussion of the fundamental principles we are evolving in the development of digital humanities, such as the possible role of AI, the appropriate use of statistical tools, the relation to allied fields like corpus linguistics, the evolution of concepts like hypertext. If it succeeds, this section should constitute in toto a superb starting point for further discussions in this ever-broadening field.

Pieces published in this section may be of flexible length, depending on subject and treatment. The audience will be the entire community of computing humanists, especially the newer entrants, who need the orientation they presumably are not getting now. Those outside the field would also turn to this section to keep up with what we are doing, where we come from, and where we hope we are going.

Reviews

The journal will include reviews, and in particular reviews of software, tools, new projects, and relevant web sites. Book reviews are already covered by LLC and hence are a lower priority. In addition to individual short reviews of particular resources, this section should also include periodic review articles covering a particular genre or topic (e.g. a certain type of software, web sites devoted to a certain subject). These may be by the editor or by someone he/she would commission.

News

The news section would begin primarily as a method of notifying readers that updates have been made to the journal. News would be posted at the journal site and also made available as an RSS feed to which readers (and discussion lists) could subscribe. In addition to the notification function, the news editor could use this venue to post notices of interesting happenings in the digital humanities world.

Reader Commentary and Discussion

To exploit the interactive possibilities of this mode of publication, the journal should encourage reader commentary and discussion in ways that enhance the journal's content and the community's experience of it. Reader comments will be supported on all peer-reviewed articles and "Issues" pieces. Comments will be permitted for a defined period following an article's publication, so as to encourage a sense of timeliness and vibrancy in the discussion.

Future possibilities

In addition to the above sections, there are some additional ideas that have emerged through the planning process which may be implemented immediately, if someone is willing to commit the time to editing them, or could be kept for the future as resources and talent become available. These include:

Project reports: in this community, the project report is a valuable and distinctive form which is often not well served by being turned into an article. This journal would provide a special forum for project reports and updates: these would be substantive pieces, describing the project's work and goals, and situating it in the larger context of the field. Taken together, this section would provide a valuable record of project development over time. This record would be even more valuable if we required, or recommended, that authors include certain basic information (e.g. technologies used, markup languages used, pointers to documentation and DTDs, etc.) to allow for comparison.

Guest blogger of the month: the journal will house a blog for which we will recruit a series of guest bloggers. The goal is to have the guest blogger reflect and write specifically about issues raised by the journal contents and ADHO-related issues and material, rather than simply duplicating the contents of his/her regular blog. We will seek some sustained trains of thought that might lead from blogger to blogger, to elicit multiple perspectives on a given issue. We will also identify key events (conferences, exhibits, publications) during the course of the year which deserve comment, and try to identify bloggers for those times who may be attending the event, or have particularly relevant interests and expertise.

Bibliographic database: it would be valuable to pull out all citations from articles published in the journal and create a bibliographic database which could be searched and analysed. This would enable searches of the "articles that cited source X also cited…" variety as well as providing a growing record of the currently cited research in the field.

Digests of listserv threads: it has often been suggested that someone should pull together certain material posted on active listservs such as Humanist or TEI-L. The journal could sponsor and publish edited discussion threads on relevant topics (such as intepretation and markup), which would place the various postings in order, perhaps with some annotation or additional commentary to provide context.

Interviews with foundational figures: it has been suggested that this journal commission and publish interviews (in textual and/or video form) with key figures in the history of digital humanities research and practice. These interviews would capture the more personal side of that history.

Organizational Structure

Editor-in-Chief and General Editor(s)

This group (of up to three) have general editorial oversight over the journal. They represent a range of specialization within digital humanities. They serve for a five-year renewable term. Specific responsibilities and activities include:

Section Editors

The section editors each have responsibility for a particular area of the journal's coverage. Section editors sign up to serve for three years in the first instance. To begin with, we envision section editors in the following areas:

The responsibilities for section editors who oversee publication content include

Their role and responsibilities are described in more detail in a "Notes for Editors" document.

Area Editors

The area editors are liaisons with particular areas, communities, and disciplines covered by the journal. They are responsible for recruiting new material in their area of specialization, and as a group for maintaining a balance of material from all of the areas. They are also responsible for helping to ensure that papers in the various areas speak not only to readers from their specific area, but also address a broader digital humanities audience. They should ideally read all articles submitted in their area and actively recruit new material to fill unaddressed areas. To begin with, we envision commissioning areas at least in the following domains, with additional areas to be determined in further discussion:

Area editors serve for a three-year renewable term.

Managing Editor

This is a paid part-time position. Responsibilities include:

Advisory board

This group represents the intellectual scope and authority of the journal. Its members provide high-level advice and strategic perspective, and may also contribute to the reviewing, mentoring, and other activities. It includes the members of the ADHO steering committee ex officio. Advisory board members serve for a three-year renewable term.

Technical Infrastructure

Publication

The essential principles for the technical infrastructure of the journal's publication are:

Workflow

The workflow for the journal will be entirely electronic. Materials will be accepted through a web submission form which will also require certain minimal metadata (author name, institution, contact info, etc.). Reviewers will be notified by email and will do their reviews online (using a system similar to the one currently used by ACH and ALLC for conference paper reviewing). Editors will oversee the process through an administrative view which allows them to track the progress of submissions through the reviewing system.

Submissions will all be made electronically, but they may come in a variety of forms (including word-processing files, XML, and multimedia formats). After review, materials will be converted to XML (except multimedia formats, which will be published in their original form).

Logistics

Peer review process

Articles submitted for publication will be reviewed by at least three peer reviewers. Details of the review process are given in the "Notes for Editors" document.

Submissions for the "Issues", Reviews, and News sections will not be peer reviewed, but will be vetted by their respective editors.

The peer review process will be tracked online through a database system which will allow for close coordination between the editors, managing editor, and reviewers.

Periodicity

This journal will take advantage of its electronic form in not adhering to a conventional publication schedule of volumes and issues. Materials appearing in the journal will be identified by the year of publication and a serial number. They will be published as soon as they are completed, and a notice will be sent out via the "News" section (and its RSS feed) alerting readers to the presence of new material. At quarterly intervals, a more substantial notice will be sent out (e.g. to Humanist, other venues) with a list of the materials posted during that quarter.

Each quarter, at least three articles will be published, together with at least two "Issues" pieces and one or more reviews.

Data formats

The journal is committed to using open, standards-compliant data formats which will provide for long-term archiving and maximal accessibility. The journal will work with authors to make multimedia works accessible and archivable. In some cases, it may not be possible to guarantee that multimedia materials will remain accessible; in these cases, the article abstract will include a full description of the multimedia content and screen shots, where possible.

Intellectual property

This area needs careful thought. The journal will be published on an open-access basis. The journal should not seek any exclusive publication rights to the material included: copyright should reside with the author, and the journal should obtain a non-exclusive perpetual right to publish the material in electronic form. We need to consider whether materials published in the journal may be reused under some form of public license, or whether the journal should place more conventional restrictions on reuse.

Multilinguality

The principle of multilinguality and broad cultural inclusiveness is central to the work of digital humanities, and ADHO is committed to supporting research in digital humanities on a broadly international and multilingual basis. The chief limitations, for the journal, is funding for translation and the availability of peer reviewers in languages other than English. Our approach to start with will be based on volunteer effort. Articles may be submitted and published in any language, subject to the availability of peer reviewers. Article abstracts will be published in English and at least one other language. Assistance (though not full translation services) will be available to contributors for whom English is not their first language. We will seek volunteers to assist with the translation of abstracts, and if enough volunteer effort is available, we will translate articles as well. Editorials, news, and reviews will be published in English only to begin with.

Startup process and launch

June 2005: Announcement of the new journal at ACH/ALLC 2005 in Victoria.

Summer 2005: assemble editorial team and peer reviewers; establish technical infrastructure and workflow; begin soliciting submissions

Fall 2005: start review process for first set of submissions

Winter 2006: first peer-reviewed articles published