In reaction to the rapid decline in linguistic diversity around the world, there has been a broad call for the increased allocation of resources and efforts to support the documentation of endangered languages and linguistic practices, and furthermore the active participation of speech communities in the documentation process (Himmelmann, 1998; Rice, 2011). This is reflected in the emergence of journals, conferences and workshops, as well as funding agencies and programs dedicated to supporting the discipline of language documentation.
Despite these encouraging developments, 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). There is an expressed need specifically for peer-review of documentary outputs, but no established standards for doing so (Thieberger et al., 2016; LSA Executive Committee, 2018; Woodbury, 2014; Haspelmath and Michaelis, 2014).
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 in academic evaluation systems such as in hiring, promotion, and tenure. We welcome contributions that explore assessment criteria and procedures, as well as peer-authored reviews and curator-authored case studies of documentary materials.
Submissions on the following topics and related areas are encouraged:
Submission Instructions
All submissions should be 3,000-6,000 words in length (references not included), and will be considered full length research papers in the JOHD submission system. The deadline for submissions to this special collection is July 1st, 2021. Manuscripts will be sent for single-blind peer review after editorial consideration, and accepted papers will be published online in the journal’s special collection. Please follow the submission guidelines to submit your manuscript and please indicate that you are submitting to the special collection on Language Documentation in your cover letter.
Please note that there are Publication Fees for accepted papers. If you have any questions about fees, contact Anastasia Sakellariadi at a.sakellariadi@ubiquitypress.com. If you have any questions about the special collection, feel free to contact the editors at johd.language.documentation@gmail.com.
About the Journal
The Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) is an academic journal specifically dedicated to publications describing humanities research objects, software, and methods with high potential for reuse. 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. Potential authors are encouraged to review JOHD’s policies regarding author-retained copyright, Creative Commons licenses, data publication, and ethics. Authors retain copyright and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons-Attribution license agreement. Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories.
About the Guest Editors
Richard Griscom is a researcher at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. His research focuses on the documentation and description of endangered languages, with an emphasis on the languages of East Africa, and the development of digital data collection and processing methods for researchers working in resource-constrained environments.
Lauren B. Collister is a faculty librarian and the Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing for the University of Pittsburgh Library System. Her research background in sociolinguistics focuses on language change, identity, and online communication. Her current work focuses on reproducibility, open scholarship, data management, and intellectual property in linguistics research.
Hugh J. Paterson III is an unaffiliated collaborative researcher with a background in language documentation in Nigeria and Mexico. He has worked in accessions and digitization at a language archive, and as a user interaction designer for digital experiences. He is interested in leveraging language technology for the benefit of language communities and in the ways they desire to see their language used.
Berez-Kroeker, Andrea L., Lauren Gawne, Susan Smythe Kung, Barbara F. Kelly, Tyler Heston, Gary Holton, Peter Pulsifer, et al. 2018. Reproducible research in linguistics: A position statement on data citation and attribution in our field. Linguistics 56(1). 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2017-0032.
Haspelmath, Martin & Susana Maria Michaelis. 2014. Annotated corpora of small languages as refereed publications: A vision. Diversity Linguistics Comment. https://dlc.hypotheses.org/691.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36. 161–195.
LSA Executive Committee. 2018. Statement on Evaluation of Language Documentation for Hiring, Tenure, and Promotion. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/Evaluation_Lg_Documentation.pdf (29 November, 2020).
Mazzitelli, Lidia Federica. 2020. Documentation of Lakurumau: Making the case for one more language in Papua New Guinea. Language Documentation & Conservation 14. 215–237.
Rice, Keren. 2011. Documentary Linguistics and Community Relations. Language Documentation & Conservation 5. 187–207.
Riesberg, Sonja. 2018. Reflections on descriptive and documentary adequacy. In McDonnell, Bradley, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, and Gary Holton. (Eds.) Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication no. 15. [PP 151-156] Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/24816
Salffner, Sophie. 2015. A guide to the Ikaan language and culture documentation. Language Documentation & Conservation 9. 237–267.
Sullivant, Ryan. 2020. Archival description for language documentation collections. Language Documentation & Conservation 14. 520–578.
Thieberger, Nick, Anna Margetts, Stephen Morey & Simon Musgrave. 2016. Assessing Annotated Corpora as Research Output. Australian Journal of Linguistics 36(1). 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2016.1109428.
Woodbury, Anthony C. 2014. Archives and audiences: Toward making endangered language documentations people can read, use, understand, and admire. Language Documentation and Description 12(Special Issue on Language Documentation and Archiving). 19–36.
Posted on 09 Mar 2021
Posted on 09 Mar 2021
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. This special collection of the Journal of Open Humanities Data is open to both authors who presented at the CHR2020 workshop and intend to submit a paper highlighting the aspect of humanities data and to new authors.
For this special collection we invite submissions of two varieties:
Topics of focus are the features and challenges of humanities data for computational research, including scale and size, sampling and representativeness, data complexity, multidimensionality, multimodality, diachrony, as well as the challenges of preparing data for computational humanities inquiries.
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.
The deadline for submissions to this special issue is 1 March 2021. Manuscripts will be sent for double-blind peer review after editorial consideration, and accepted papers will be published online in the journal’s special collection. Please follow the submission guidelines to submit your manuscript.
Note: there are Publication Fees for accepted papers. Publication Fees are scheduled to increase from 2nd March 2021.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact the editors at info@computational-humanities-research.org
About the journal
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 (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.
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.
About the Guest Editors
Folgert Karsdorp is a researcher at the Meertens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. His research focuses on quantitative approaches to cultural transmission and cultural evolution. He recently published a textbook on quantitative data analysis in the humanities, called Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Melvin Wevers is an Assistant Professor in Urban History and Digital Methods at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include the philosophy of history, historical methods, and the study of cultural-historical phenomena using computational means. He has a specific research interest in the evolution of ideas, values, and practices in advertising discourse.
Adina Nerghes is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Wageningen University & Research. Her research focuses on language use in various social contexts and emerging social structures. She has investigated the refugee crisis debates in social media, strategies of health consumers and their interactions in the social media space, and discourses of newspapers, central banks, and the European Parliament.
Posted on 22 Jan 2021
Posted on 21 Jan 2021
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:
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.
Posted on 18 Jul 2020