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The rapid spread of ‘Coronavirus Disease 2019’ (COVID-19) on a global scale has resulted in an international pandemic making this a defining global health crisis of our time. The impact of the pandemic extends beyond health outcomes to include widespread social, economic, political, cultural and environmental effects to the individual, community and society. In the first time in our recent history the far reaching impact of this pandemic serves as a stark reminder of our global interdependence and the interconnectedness of disciplines.

This global impact opens a unique opportunity for researchers to explore these widespread effects through the lens of the Humanities. Moreover, the availability of open data is critical to allow for the needed investigation of the pandemic, and to help us understand and contextualise it.

We are planning the publication of a special collection of the Journal of Open Humanities Data entitled: “Humanities Data in the time of COVID-19”.

Submissions can include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Social impact of COVID-19 across various domains of life (health, work, school, relationships) over the lifespan 
• Impact of COVID-19 using cross-cultural comparisons 
• Historical comparison(s) of pandemics or diseases 
• Implications of migration, movement, and/or restriction/free-will 
• Evaluation or shift of identity or self-image (including uptake of face coverings, social distancing and limited person-to-person contact) 
• Impact, use, and access to social media and the internet 
• Politicisation of health, movement, messaging, and gatherings 
• Use and/or change of language across time, including translation and analysis of information for multilingual populations 
• Data representation, presentation, and access to information 
• Artistic responses to COVID-19 (art, music, theatre, expression) 
• Interconnectedness of society at local, national, and/or global levels 
• Community and country response to inequality, food insecurity, mobilisation of resources 
• Religion or moral identity and its effect on well-being and connectedness 
• Attitudes and behaviours related to COVID-19 including risk perception, social belonging, national identification, political ideology, and conspiracy theories 

The deadline for submissions to this special collection is 30 September 2020. Manuscripts will be peer reviewed after editorial consideration, and accepted papers will be published online on a rolling basis. Accepted publications are subject to a publishing fee of £100 +VAT (if applicable) for short papers and £300 + VAT (if applicable) for long papers; a discount or waiver can be applied for and all applications are considered. Follow the submission guidelines to submit your manuscript.

The Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) is a growing open-access peer-reviewed academic journal specifically dedicated to publications describing humanities research objects, software, and methods with high potential for reuse. These might include curated resources like (annoptated) linguistic corpora, ontologies, and lexicons, as well as databases, maps, atlases, linked data objects, and other data sets created with qualitative, quantitative, or computational methods. For this special collection we invite submissions of two varieties:

1. Short data papers contain a concise description of a humanities research object with high reuse potential from research related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These are short (1000 words) highly structured narratives and must conform to the data paper template. A data paper does not replace a traditional research article, but rather complements it.

2. Full length research papers discuss and illustrate methods, challenges, and limitations in the creation, collection, management, access, processing, or analysis of data in Humanities research related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including standards and formats. These are intended to be longer narratives (3000 - 5000 words), which give authors the ability to contribute to a broader discussion around the impact of the pandemic.

Humanities subjects of interest to JOHD include, but are not limited to Art History, Classics, History, Linguistics, Literature, Modern Languages, Music and musicology, Philosophy, Religious Studies etc. Research that crosses one or more of these traditional disciplinary boundaries is highly encouraged. JOHD provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Authors remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement. Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories.

If you are interested in submitting an article, please express your interest to: Sahba Besharati (sahba.besharati@wits.ac.za) and Mandy Wigdorowitz (mw738@cam.ac.uk)

Sahba Besharati and Mandy Wigdorowitz (special collection guest editors) Barbara McGillivray (editor-in-chief of the Journal of Open Humanities Data)

About the Guest Editors:

Sahba Besharati is a neuropsychologist and senior lecturer in cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). She completed a collaborative PhD in neuropsychology from King’s College London and the University of Cape Town (UCT), having previously trained in psychological research and clinical neuropsychology at UCT. Dr Besharati’s research specialises in the area of human social-affective neuroscience. Her research integrates neuroimaging, neuropsychological and experimental methods to investigate self-consciousness and social cognition. She is the co-founder of a new cross-disciplinary neuroscience group, Wits NeuRL, which aims to advance the research and practice of the neurosciences in the South African context.

Mandy Wigdorowitz is a PhD candidate in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She is researching the psycholinguistic and cognitive effects of language experience in multilinguals with a focus on language, education, and interaction from linguistic, social, cognitive and psychological perspectives. In addition to her doctoral research, she is a registered Research Psychologist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa and an Executive Member of the Division for Research and Methodology of the Psychological Society of South Africa.

Ubiquity Press would like to welcome JOHD’s new Editor in Chief, Dr Barbara McGillivray. Barbara’s background is in computational linguistics for classical languages. She is a Turing research fellow at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and at The Alan Turing Institute. Barbara aims to make JOHD a key part of a thriving community of scholars sharing humanities data.

We would also like to thank Dr Nicholas Weber for his hard work and efforts during the first years of the journal.

The Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) features peer-reviewed publications describing humanities research objects, software, and methods with high potential for reuse. These might include curated resources like (annotated) linguistic corpora, ontologies, and lexicons, as well as databases, maps, atlases, linked data objects, and other data sets created with qualitative, quantitative, or computational methods. 

We are currently inviting submissions of two varieties:

1. Short data papers contain a concise description of a humanities research object with high reuse potential. These are short (1000 words) highly structured narratives and must conform to the data paper template.  A data paper does not replace a traditional research article, but rather complements it. 

2. Full length research papers discuss and illustrate methods, challenges, and limitations in the creation, collection, management, access, processing, or analysis of data in humanities research, including standards and formats. These are intended to be longer narratives (3000 - 5000 words), which give authors the ability to contribute to a broader discussion.

Humanities subjects of interest to JOHD include, but are not limited to Art History, Classics, History, Linguistics, Literature, Modern Languages, Music and musicology, Philosophy, Religious Studies, etc. Research that crosses one or more of these traditional disciplinary boundaries is highly encouraged.

JOHD provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Authors remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. 

The Journal of Open Humanities Data is indexed by the following services: Chronos, Center for Open Science, OpenAIRE, ExLibris, Journal TOCs, CNKI, CrossRef, JISC KB+, SHERPA RoMEO, EBSCOHost, Cengage Learning and Google Scholar. In addition, all journals are available for harvesting via OAI-PMH. To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises CLOCKSS, and LOCKSS archiving systems to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.

Submit Now! We accept online submissions via our journal website. See Author Guidelines for further information. Alternatively, please contact the editors if you are unsure as to whether your research is suitable for submission to the journal.