Digithum reaches double digits

Digithum reaches its tenth issue and this is worth highlighting given what it means for the consolidation of the project and the confirmation of its relevance and viability. The journal reaches this landmark, which we hope will be the first of many, immersed in a process of continuous improvement that has seen it indexed in the most demanding journal directories. Blind review by two peers in all cases, and the series of formal and management requirements mean that it has been included in the leading indices and is increasingly well respected.

These have been 10 years of continued effort from the team responsible for the journal, and the collaborators and advisors. The aim has been to look more closely at the founding principles, offering reflections and results from research related to the repercussions of the digital world in areas of study and methods linked to the human and social sciences. The wealth and quality of the originals are a sign of the evolution that Digithum has undergone.

Among the initiatives proposed and maintained by Digithum, there is the desire to guarantee a version in Catalan of all the articles accepted, in accordance with the social responsibility and commitment that the scientific community has to society. Likewise, versions are published in the original language or in a translation in English for as many articles as possible (depending on the resources available). This may be considered a luxury, but it is simply a commitment to multilingualism.

Similarly, as well as the selection of articles and the proposal of subject-related dossiers by the editorial team, the work carried out by the editors and technicians ensures the overall quality of each issue, accessibility of materials, indexing and, in short, the journal's wider reach. One of the projects planned is to offer, in the near future, a second dossier for the same issue during the same year. Thus, the issue uploaded to the internet in May will be added to with new content in November.

The contents of this issue of Digithum, which celebrates 10 years in existence, are linked to another anniversary: the 30 years since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. The dossier, coordinated by Dr Carles Prado-Fonts, UOC, includes a number of articles (by D. Martínez-Robles, A. Galvany, B. Guarné and C. Prado-Fonts himself) linked to the impact of Said's work, stressing its importance and relevance and looking to enrich the current debates in a range of disciplinary fields related to the study of East Asia and contribute to the publicising of these debates in society. It is a subject and approach that is fully integrated into contemporary society and which has, over recent years, revolutionised human and social sciences, whilst remaining perfectly up-to-date today.

Likewise, the journal's miscellany section includes four articles linked to our main aims by Toni Cambra (Web 2.0 as a dystopia in the recent internet), Edgardo Civallero (Ancestral cultures in modern universes), Núria Bel, Santiago Bel, Sergio Espeja, Montserrat Marimon and Marta Villegas (The CLARIN project: a scientific research infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences) and Roser Morante Vallejo (Automatic semantic role labelling using a memory-based learning system).

Finally, we are pleased to see the level of interest in the journal and its contents. Digithum has, on average, 2,100 visits and more than 1,600 PDF downloads a month (which add up to nearly 9,200 PDF downloads since 2005, without including the seven issues predating this) and 350 subscribers in three languages.

We are also very pleased, as we have already mentioned, to see the increased number and prestige of databases indexing Digithum, as shown in the indexing section. The latest entries have been in Latindex (the regional online information system for scientific journals in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal); in the Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography (a classified listing of books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore and linguistics), and Linguistic abstracts (a classified listing of articles from linguistics journals published since 1985).

These are the positive results of the efforts we have made since the start, of which we are rightly satisfied. These results are equally important for readers visiting the journal and, above all, for the increasing number of authors who send us their articles to be assessed and, where applicable, published in Digithum.

Narcís Figueras
Director

•  

  Print it

•  

  Recommend it