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FAQ
Questions from our authors
All authors or articles dealing with research about the past (including some aspects of memory studies) are welcomed to publish in the JDH.
Nevertheless, the Journal of Digital History publishes data-driven research articles. The definition of data-driven can be broad and the best ways to find out if your article project fits in is to look at the articles that were already published or to drop an email to [email protected]. We meet all potential authors either before or shortly after they submitted an abstract.
Many historians or researchers working on the past may be a bit reluctant to publish in the Journal of Digital History as it most often implies to write code or to use our very specific writing environment that is based on Jupyter notebooks. We advise you to partner up with digital humanists or colleagues from computer sciences, as our published authors already did (see, for instance: Twitter and feminist commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising)
The Journal of Digital History intends to promote data-driven scholarship and transmedia storytelling in the historical sciences. To that aim, the JDH adopted a novel multi-layered approach, inspired by Robert Darnton’s 1999 article in the New York Review. Each article include:
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a narration layer involving transmedia storytelling - in this layer, authors expose the results of their research, using all narrative means the web offers;
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a hermeneutic layer that explores the methodological implications of using digital tools and data and contains the written code;
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a data layer providing access to data, when legally and technically possible.
The difference between narrative and hermeneutic layers is the biggest difficulty, on the conceptual level, that authors are encountering when writing articles for the Journal of Digital History. Theoretically, the narrative layer will expose the results of your research and the hermeneutic layer will include your methods, reflexive comments and the code you have, when necessary, written. In practice, making the difference between the two layers is always more difficult than it seems, especially for articles that are centered on a strong methodological thinking.
Let’s imagine that an author or group of authors would like to publish a digital history article in a “traditional” journal. The latter, probably based on the reviews, will probably ask you to cut down methodological parts of their article and will not allow the joint publication of code and data. It is for this precise reason that we imagined the hermeneutic layer.
In any case, if you hesitate to submit an abstract because the difference between narrative and hermeneutic layers doesn’t seem clear to you, send us an email to [email protected].
Yes, we will accompany you all along the submission, writing, peer reviewing and publication processes.
For now, we do support R and python. Jupyter Notebooks can also easily support julia and theoretically many more languages. Nevertheless, and though we try to be flexible and to offer authors the support they need, if you wish to write an article with code written in another language that R or python, please contact us at [email protected].
The JDH’s writing environment is based on Jupyter Notebooks, that offers the possibility to add extensions, including cite2c that connects notebooks to Zotero. Zotero is hence a part of our infrastructure that all authors will have to use when writing articles.
The JDH’s peer review policy is based on double blind peer review. Your article will be reviewed by one member of the JDH board and by an external reviewer, through De Gruyter’s peer reviewing platform. We aim at a fast, smooth and rigorous, though it is not always to be fast and rigorous, and rigour will never be sacrificed to rapidity.
We perfectly know that, especially in contemporary history, there are many legal barriers to open data (privacy and copyright for instance). So, if the JDH’s policy is to encourage open data, we will not refuse articles that are based on data that cannot be published.
Yes. The JDH encourages diamond open access. There are no author’s fee.
Once your article is ready for publication, we will ask you to send us a summary of the main aspects of your article, in the form of a series of tweets. We will publish those ‘tweets’ on our social media accounts (Twitter and Facebook).
There are two types of tables of content (ToC): within the article on the right side and on the article overview page in form of the fingerprint.
The table of contents within the article page:
- the size of the dots indicates the level of the heading
- the color of the text indicates the layer (teal for hermeneutics, black for narrative layer)
- figures are shown with a small image icon
- the link icon indicates the latest navigation
The fingerprint (table of contents) on the article overview page:
- the dotted circle indicates the total notebook
- inside the circle is the hermeneutics (in teal color), outside the narrative layer (in black).
- the color purple indicates cells of code.
- circles along the notebook indicate headings, further away from the circle, subheadings.
- additional dots on top of the line and dot indicate the richness of references. Regarding the interaction, users can hover over a cell in order to read the first few words of the given cell and click to navigate to the selected cell.
A detailed visual explanation for the fingerprint can be found here.