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The Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) features peer-reviewed publications describing humanities research objects 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.

While we publish continuously, this call for papers has a submission deadline on 1st September 2022. Final publication is expected by the end of the year or (in exceptional cases) early 2023.

This particular call for papers is focussed on short data papers. Short data papers contain a concise description of a humanities research object with high reuse potential. They are short (1000 words) highly structured narratives and must conform to the data paper template.

Humanities subjects of interest to the 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. Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. More information about editorial policies and archiving is available on the journal’s web pages. 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.

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

Given the growing interest, continued relevance, and changing landscape of the pandemic with the start of a global vaccination roll out, as well as the diverse range of data papers we have received for the special collection, Humanities data in the time of COVID-19, the Journal of Open Humanities Data is opening up a second call for papers!

The current collection engages in critical analyses and describes open-access datasets covering various areas of enquiry around the pandemic, which draw on sources from diary contributions, oral and written narratives, photographs and maps, survey data, and social media and video accounts. These papers highlight the social and cultural impact of the virus, as well as subsequent government lockdown measures. The papers have diverse and impactful reuse potential and are of interest for a range of humanities and social science scholars.

We invite you to submit a data paper by 31 October 2021 that captures the human experience and global impact of COVID-19 through the perspective of the humanities.

Click here to find out more about the special collection and second call for papers.

If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch with the special collection editors, Mandy Wigdorowitz (mw738@cam.ac.uk) and Sahba Besharati (sahba.besharati@wits.ac.za).

The lack of “guidelines and metrics for evaluating data creation, curation, sharing, and re-use” (Berez-Kroeker et al., 2018) poses a significant challenge for practitioners of language documentation, who often struggle to earn recognition from the academic community for the documentary records that they produce (Riesberg, 2018), reflecting a discipline-specific manifestation of broader lack of recognition of the merit of open scholarship for review and hiring (Alperin et al. 2019). 

The aim of this Special Collection of the Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) is to develop a detailed outline of what an effective peer-review process for documentary materials might look like, and how such a system would foster better recognition for these materials.

To read the entire Call, click here.

Research in computational and quantitative approaches to humanities data is a fast growing interdisciplinary area. The first Computational Humanities Research workshop (CHR2020) took place online from 18 to 20 November 2020, organized by the DHLab of the KNAW Humanities Cluster in Amsterdam and The Alan Turing Institute. Although most research presented had a strong data-driven component, the focus of the workshop was primarily on methods, techniques, and computational analyses in humanities research. Thus, the challenges of the underlying humanities data for computational research remained relatively underexposed, but are at least as important. This special collection aims to highlight the challenges of humanities data for computational research.

To read the rest of this Call, click here.

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.

To read the rest of this Call, click here.