About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The Journal of Digital Humanities and Social Research publishes peer-reviewed work at the meeting point of humanities scholarship, computational method and empirical social science. We are particularly interested in research that treats method as a substantive question rather than a technical preliminary: papers that report what a technique obscures as carefully as what it reveals.

The journal welcomes submissions across the following areas:

  • Digital humanities: text mining, corpus construction, manuscript digitisation and computational literary study
  • Cultural analytics and the quantitative study of cultural production
  • Archival theory, memory studies and the politics of documentation
  • Empirical social research on migration, language, urban life and institutions
  • Research methodology, measurement and questions of reproducibility in the human sciences

We give particular attention to scholarship concerning Central Asia and the wider post-Soviet region, though the journal is not restricted by geography.

Aims

Computational tools have entered humanities and social research faster than the conventions for reporting them. Studies routinely present aggregate accuracy figures while omitting the preprocessing decisions that determine them. The journal exists in part to correct this: we ask authors to document method in enough detail that a reader could disagree with it.

We also publish negative and inconclusive results where the method is sound, and we treat replication as a contribution in its own right.

Publication Frequency

Two issues per year, in spring and autumn. Accepted articles appear in the next scheduled issue; we do not operate continuous publication.

Peer Review

All submissions are subject to double-blind peer review by at least two independent reviewers. Editors screen submissions for scope and methodological adequacy before review; desk rejection at this stage is normally returned within two weeks. The median time from submission to first decision is approximately ten weeks.

Reviewers are asked to comment specifically on whether the methods described would support the claims made, and whether the data and code necessary to evaluate the work are available.

Open Access Policy

The journal is fully open access. All content is available without subscription or embargo from the moment of publication, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Authors retain copyright in their work.

There are no article processing charges, submission fees or publication charges of any kind.

Identifiers and Preservation

Every article is assigned a DOI registered with Crossref. Metadata is exposed through OAI-PMH for harvesting by indexing services and aggregators. Content is preserved through the PKP Preservation Network.

Publication Ethics

The journal follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices. Allegations of plagiarism, data fabrication, undisclosed conflicts of interest or duplicate submission are investigated in accordance with COPE flowcharts. Where correction or retraction is warranted, notices are published and linked from the original article, which is never silently removed.

Authors are asked to disclose the use of generative tools in the preparation of manuscripts, including for translation or code generation.