LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Report for committee meetings at DH 2007

Marilyn Deegan, Editor-in-Chief, 1 June 2007 Centre for Computing in the Humanities King's College London The Strand London WC2R 2LS Phone 07940 570228 Fax 020 7848 2980 Email marilyn.deegan@kcl.ac.uk

Production issues

Publish-ahead-of-Print continues to be popular with authors and Manuscript Central continues to work well for paper submissions. We are also trying out MC for the book reviews, though there have been some glitches in the system. It is more difficult to run book reviews through an online system as the system can’t handle everything as it can with papers. At some point you have to send out a physical object. We are at an early stage with this, and will evaluate it later this year.

We have a new production editor, Eva Gooding. Handover to her from Maxine Smith, our previous editor, has been smooth, and we anticipate no problems.

Copy

Copy is slower coming in than last year: we have had 18 papers submitted through Manuscript Central, and we also have 8 papers from Paris 2006 which will be published in LLC 22.3. We still have a good deal of copy in the pipeline, so there are no problems with copy flow. I am still finding it difficult to find reviewers for some papers. See further below. We would be very grateful if colleagues who are interested in reviewing for us could register with the Manuscript Central system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/llc. All the committee members are part of the editorial board, and it would be very helpful if people could sign up as reviewers.

Name and focus of the journal

We agreed when we renewed the contract with OUP that we would modify the title of the journal a little to reflect the broader scope. The journal is now known as LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. This has been changed in the print journal, but not yet in the online journal. We are conscious that we will have to make an effort to ensure that the rebranding is consistent across the web site, on email signatures, headed notepaper etc. The editorial team has also been having some discussions about the scope of the journal, which we have discussed in the past between ourselves and with the committees, in particular the ALLC committee as the issue was one which we have been talking about since before CHUM was dropped. We haven’t come to any firm conclusions, but we feel that it is time to raise the issue again. Historically, the journal did what the original title suggests: it published articles on literary and linguistic computing, with a good deal of focus on text analysis, authorship studies, corpus linguistics. It tended to steer clear of 'hard' computational linguistics. But the ALLC has changed focus over the years, as the use of computers in the humanities extended, and the journal extended its remit. When I took over in 1996, I wanted to extend the remit even further, and we have often had discussions about just how far that should go. We do tend still to focus on text primarily, we don't publish too much on music, art, archaeology, or even history. When we had discussions with DHQ at the start, we felt that perhaps DHQ would publish work that lends itself more naturally to a more dynamic online presentation—perhaps with some kind of interactive components. Looking at the first issue of DHQ, there is nothing there that couldn't have worked for LLC (though some of the colour images would have been printed as B&W in the paper journal). This is in no way a criticism, merely a comment. DHQ has achieved a very high standard in a very short time.

We do need to consider how we define ourselves now, and how we relate to what DHQ publishes. What do we mean by ‘digital scholarship in the humanities’ in our title? Who should be defining this? Many of our authors still see us as a journal that does the things we always did--we get many authorship and text analysis, computational linguistics etc. Some of the papers are very specialized, and my feeling is that we should be publishing over a broad range that suits our readership. I sometimes struggle very hard to find suitable reviewers for papers, which indicated to me that the appeal of them would be very narrow. We do need fairly soon to agree a scope and a mission for the journal, and the editorial team really needs input from the Associations and the editorial board. Should we be seeking papers outside the textual area? Anything that would be presented at DH conferences should be within our scope, so maybe we should look across the papers accepted and see what the scope is there. Any suggestions very welcome.

OUP Journals Day

In March, Simon Horobin attended the OUP Journals Day. He reports as follows:

It opened with presentations from OUP staff on the way that journals are changing: mostly focusing on the increase in e-only subscriptions (though this is much more advanced in the Sciences than Humanities). There was an interesting presentation by the head of the Leicester library about the challenges librarians face from these changes, particularly financial considerations arising through 'big deals', ie subject bundles and the corresponding squeeze on monograph and ILL budgets. There was a session on business strategies which was mostly designed to reassure us that OUP is providing the best quality product at the cheapest price to subscribers. Perhaps most useful was the opportunity to meet other editors and to talk about the role of the editorial board etc.