General

About

Since 2016, 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. “Cultural Analytics” combines the very best of these areas of inquiry, but defining what falls outside of its remit remains a challenge. We agree with and re-assert the journal’s original mission to publish peer-reviewed articles that 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

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

• 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?