The new field of data-driven history of ideas combines qualitative, quantitative and computational methods for the study of the origins, development and spread of ideas from any time and place. It also comes with two challenging demands that are distinctive in the landscape of computational humanities. The first is the demand for the adequate representation and detection of concepts, rather than words; the second is the need for high-quality, virtually 100% accurate large corpora in many languages across centuries by both known and virtually unknown authors seen as carriers of ideas. These two main demands generate in turn further needs on resources that must be, typically, newly created or substantially adapted for the field: datasets such as expertly curated sets of bibliographic metadata, annotation sets and historical gazetteers, ontologies, and network data; infrastructural facilities for collaborative environments, and workflows that suit and support the field; ground truths for the evaluation of models from language technology, and techniques integrating language models with approaches and tools from data science, visual analytics, and knowledge representation.

Results produced in the field can be published in the same way as traditional articles in in-domain journals and books. The resources that make data-driven enterprises in the history of ideas possible, however, still lack an apt venue, despite the fact that work on such resources is key to the field and can be extremely time-consuming. It is with the intention of creating a home for openly shareable corpora, datasets and other resources, as well as to support the work of the next generation of researchers, that we invite submissions to a special collection of the Journal of Open Humanities Data on Data-Driven History of Ideas.

Submissions for this special collection are welcome that focus on, facilitate or support the study of philosophical and scientific thought of any epoch and geographical area, geared in particular towards the origin, development and spread of ideas.

Submission topics include, but are not limited to

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 * Textual data: high-quality, virtually 100% accurate corpora from any epoch and language

* Ground truths and annotation datasets

* Curated collections of bibliographical metadata and full bibliographies

* Ontologies

* Lexica

* Historical gazetteers

* Collections of (historical):

* Geographic-political data eg political affiliation of cities through the centuries

* Timeline data of authors, printers, countries

* Complete publishing histories of books

* Unique identifiers

* Network data

* Academic conference data

* Computational tools focused on DDHI:

* Multilingual and multi-layout OCR postcorrection

* Transkribus models

* Applied concept-focused work in computational linguistics, data science, visual analytics, and knowledge representation (concept-detection, concept-change)

* Networks and graphs

* Data visualisations for DDHI

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. 

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:

• 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. 
• 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.

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 June 2024 (abstracts due)

1 December 2024 (full papers due, upon abstract acceptance)

Submissions:

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If you are interested in submitting an article, please submit an abstract of max. 300 words using this form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfpHO3RYHTNJRtmJRZ4QHkorN5buq8KnwKzpu1iDO1puGm5oQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

You will be asked to paste the text of the abstract in the form.

Special collection guest editors: Arianna Betti (lead guest editor), Hein van den Berg

About the Guest Editors:

Arianna Betti is Professor and Chair of Philosophy of Language at the University of Amsterdam, and leader of the Concepts in Motion group at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation.  After studying historical and systematic aspects of ideas such as axiom, truth, and fact (Against Facts, MIT Press, 2015), they now specialise in data-driven research aimed at tracing the development of ideas such as these in a strongly interdisciplinary setting. They have been member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), of the Scientific Council of the Italian Research Council (CNR), of the Global Young Academy (GYA), and recipient of two ERC grants (2008–2013, 2014–2015) as well as of several major Dutch NWO grants, including a VICI  (2017–2024).

Hein van den Berg obtained his PhD at the VU Amsterdam in history and philosophy of science in 2011, with a prize-winning dissertation on Kant’s conception of proper science and Kant’s philosophy of biology. After obtaining a postdoctoral grant from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for conducting research on the history of biology at the Technical University Dortmund, he became assistant professor at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation of the University of Amsterdam in 2016. He does research on the history and philosophy of logic, biology, and psychiatry. As a member of the Concepts in Motion group since 2011, he has been involved in a large number of computational and data-driven history of ideas projects.