General

For almost 10 years, The Journal of Cultural Analytics has challenged disciplinary boundaries and served as the foundational publishing venue for a major intellectual movement at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, and computer science. As with any new movement, its uptake has been mixed. “Cultural Analytics” combines the very best of these areas of inquiry, but defining what falls outside of its remit remains a challenge. Consequently, revising what the journal is “about” requires thinking through its scope and its aims. We agree with and re-assert the original journal’s mission that the peer-reviewed articles we accept will combine computational insight and grounding in a particular humanistic field. We highlight that the articles we are most interested in will craft thought-provoking and original arguments about how culture works at significantly larger scales than traditional research. We seek articles that clarify the academic conversations into which a contribution intervenes. We assert that theoretical sophistication and methodological innovation are not enough on their own: we are interested in how computational methods combined with cultural artifacts create and contribute to new knowledge and diverse perspectives.

Aims and Scope

Journal of Cultural Analytics publishes leading articles in the computational study of cultural artifacts. We position JCA as a bridge between the humanities and computational social sciences and information sciences, but our main audience is in the humanities and computational humanities. Though the journal is published in English, we nevertheless welcome and encourage scholars to consider cultural objects (sound, image, text, archive), processes (reading, listening, searching, sorting, curating, visualizing), and cultural agents broadly and from the widest range of geographies and cultures.

• Can computational and quantitative approaches to culture teach us something new about our datafied present?
• Can we theorize our data-driven research and analytic practices? Computational methods are not, and should not be, a replacement for a rigorous theory of method.
• Can humanities scholars play a central role in creating shared standards for computational methods and the cultural contextualization of data?
• Can we merge critical data studies, critical archival studies, and computational humanities with traditional humanist methodologies?

We consider these questions from a wide range of disciplines and recognize the long history of scholars working at the intersection of computational and humanistic research.

The journal currently features three sections:

• Articles: Profile peer-reviewed scholarship (see article submission guidelines below).
• Data Sets: Profile peer-reviewed data essays alongside curated data sets relevant to cultural study (see dataset submission guidelines below). Our aim here is to eventually provide a directory of datasets for cultural studies.
• Debates: Offer shorter, more timely interventions about computational analysis of culture, and provide space for “letters to the editor” style responses to current issues and debates. These might also provide a forum for discussion of a new methodology, dataset, or article.

We host thematic clusters that can be searched by keyword as well as special issues (see special issue proposal guidelines below).

Peer Review Policy & Ethics

Published articles and datasets in JCA go through peer review. Initial editorial screening is followed by double-blind refereeing by at least two referees. Articles and datasets often go through revisions and resubmission. While we try to accelerate our reviewing timeline as much as possible, we recognize that the uncompensated nature of the peer-review process means we might not find qualified reviewers as quickly as we would like. Our target time to decision is between 6-8 weeks. Simultaneous submission is not allowed under any circumstances. Publication of pre-prints after acceptance is discouraged.