The study of the ancient world strongly benefits from the existence of datasets: from textual corpora and field reports, to collections of inscriptions and museum catalogues, scholars rely on the availability and distribution of well-curated data. In a world of technological connections, it has become crucial to ensure not just that research is of the highest standard, but also that the underlying data is shared to enable reuse and reproducibility to the widest extent. Nevertheless, venues that prioritise the publication of ancient world data are still scarce, thus leading to a widespread lack of recognition for work such as corpus design or data curation. This creates a  problem for the field and beyond, especially because the specific characteristics of ancient world data (their fragmentary and often incomplete nature, the lack of interpretative frameworks accompanying the data themselves, and so on) create a unique set of challenges.

To address this gap, we are inviting submissions to a special collection of the Journal of Open Humanities Data entitled: Representing the Ancient World through data. 

Please note that for this special collection we define the ancient world in its broadest sense: we encourage submissions that promote a view of the ancient world expansive in its geographic, chronological, linguistic, and cultural reach.

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

• Different types of datasets/databases, such as
• Textual and literary corpora
• Linguistically annotated corpora
• Digital editions 
• Historical gazetteers
• Epigraphic collections
• Archaeological collections
• Papyrological collections
• Numismatic collections
• Collections of historical artefacts
• Collections of political-economical records in the ancient world
• Collections of religious or mythological records in the ancient world
• Collections of socio-anthropological records in the ancient world
• Computational tools focused on the study of the ancient world:
• Newly developed tools 
• New applications of pre-existing tools 
• Computational resources for ancient world studies
• Networks and graphs applied to the ancient world
• Data visualisation
• Ontologies

Manuscripts will be peer reviewed after editorial consideration, and accepted papers will be published online on a rolling basis. Please note that there are Publication Fees for accepted papers. Follow the submission guidelines to submit your manuscript and specify the name of the special collection “Representing the Ancient World through Data” in your cover letter . 

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 publishes two types of papers:

1. Short data papers contain a concise description of a humanities research object with high reuse potential from research related to the ancient world. 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 ancient world, 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 study and representation of the ancient world through data. 

For this special collection we mainly invite submissions of short data papers. However, if you wish to submit longer narratives that could fit into the full length research paper category, please get in touch.

While this special issue focuses on data-driven work on the ancient world, we encourage submissions that highlight the deep interdisciplinarity that characterises the field by bringing it into contact with humanities subjects of general interest to JOHD, including but not limited to Art History, History, Linguistics, Literature, Modern Languages, Music and Musicology, Philosophy, Religious Studies, among others.

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 licence agreement. Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories.  Please note that there are Publication Fees for accepted papers, but authors can ask for a waiver if they do not have funding for the fees.

 

Submission deadline: 1 September 2023

If you are interested in submitting an article, please express your interest to: Paola Marongiu (paola.marongiu@unine.ch), Patrick J. Burns (pjb311@nyu.edu), Andrea Farina (andrea.farina@kcl.ac.uk), Martina Astrid Rodda (martinaastrid.rodda@classics.ox.ac.uk).

Special collection guest editors: Paola Marongiu (lead guest editor), Patrick J. Burns, Andrea Farina, Martina Astrid Rodda

 

About the Guest Editors:

Patrick J. Burns is Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Library at New York University where he works on data-driven research and software development projects in ancient world data processing and historical language text mining and analysis. Patrick is a developer of LatinCy, a collection of natural language processing models for Latin, and a project lead with the Classical Language Toolkit. In addition Patrick is a member of the Journal of Open Humanities Data Editorial Board.

Andrea Farina is a PhD Student in Digital Humanities at King’s College London and holds a UKRI scholarship from the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP). In 2021, he obtained a Master’s degree in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Pavia, with a thesis focused on the Ancient Greek verb pléō ‘sail’ and its preverbed forms. During his Master's, Andrea worked as an annotator for the Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin WordNets, as well as for the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit. His research interests mostly concern computational tools and methods for Historical Linguistics, the syntax-semantics interface, and quantitative analysis in ancient languages, with a focus on motion events and preverbation. Andrea joined the Journal of Open Humanities Data in 2023, as Social Media Editor. 

Paola Marongiu is a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel, Institut des sciences du langage, where she worked as project assistant for WoPoss (SNSF n° 176778), a project on the diachrony of modal expressions in Latin. In her PhD thesis she presents a study on the co-occurrence of Latin modal markers with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.

In 2018 she obtained a Master degree in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Pavia, with a thesis focused on the conversion of the Index Thomisticus Treebank into the Universal Dependencies annotation style. Her research interests include Latin linguistics, corpus linguistics, theoretical linguistics with a focus on Semantics and Digital Humanities. Since 2021 she is Senior Social Media Editor for the Journal of Open Humanities Data.

Martina Astrid Rodda is a Leventis Early Career Researcher in Ancient Greek at Merton College, Oxford, currently working on disability and gender in Greek literature. Their postdoctoral research project focuses on the representation of disabled mythical characters in the works of Lucian of Samosata.

Their doctoral thesis was a study of formulaic variation in early Greek hexameter poetry, conducted using quantitative methods, and drawing on contemporary linguistic approaches such as Construction Grammar and Distributional Semantics to identify patterns of variation that are unique to early Greek epic formulae and do not occur in later hexameter poetry. They maintain an active interest in the dialogue between current linguistics approaches (especially Discourse Analysis and Construction Grammar) and traditional philology.