DIGITHUM: THE HUMANITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Issue 14 call for papers http://digithum.uoc.edu

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Deadline for submission of originals: 1 March 2012 Publication date: May 2012

Subject: Academic research into Wikipedia: Beyond English Wikipedia and towards comparative perspectives
Articles may be submitted in Catalan, Spanish and English.

This year saw the celebration of the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia. In 2011, following its creation 10 years ago, Wikipedia became one of the world’s 10 most visited websites and one of the most active virtual communities. It currently has around 20 million articles – 3.7 million of which are in English: the most popular version. It has some 365 million regular readers, around 90,000 regular editors – all voluntary – and hundreds of thousands of people who contribute anonymously.
Wikipedia is one of the numerous examples of mass online collaboration projects to follow in the footsteps of open-source software production and its modus operandi.
Some authors see this new type of collaboration as representing an innovative form of social production, given that it operates on the edges of the market and its rules, functions successfully without many hierarchical organisational structures or command management systems and is developed thanks to the cooperation of thousands – or, in some cases, millions – of geographically dispersed people working voluntarily and without expecting any direct remuneration. The term commons-based peer production was proposed recently to conceptualise this practice (Benkler, 2006).
Since about 2005, there has been growing interest from the scientific community, and in particular from the field of social and human sciences, in researching this historically unprecedented phenomenon. A recent review of the scientific bibliography on Wikipedia has identified over 2,100 scientific articles and 38 doctoral theses with Wikipedia and/or its sister projects as their object of analysis. However, this volume of scientific production has focused excessively on the English version of Wikipedia when Wikipedia is now available in 279 different languages. Consequently, the current bibliography does not pay sufficient attention to the dynamics and peculiarities of versions of Wikipedia in other languages, which makes a comparative analysis showing the contrasts and similarities between the different communities difficult.
The aim of this Digithum issue is to bring together articles that explore all aspects of Wikipedia – and other related projects – which may prove relevant from a social and human science research perspective. As well as the subjects that have been the focus of the scientific studies to date – motivation and type of participants, organisation and governance, regulatory structure, publishing dynamics, content quality and reliability, teaching uses, the role of technology, etc., (Okoli 2009) – proposals for new problems and objects of analysis will also be welcome. The theory and discipline may be linked to any field of social and humanistic research: political science, sociology,
anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), economics, etc.
Articles should have an empirical basis and use established qualitative or quantitative research methods in social and human sciences. Papers whose empirical focus is on versions other than those in English will be especially welcome and, in particular, those that present comparative studies showing contrasts and similarities between different size projects and/or projects in different languages, including Catalan. However, we will not be excluding papers about the English version.

Bibliography

Benkler, Y. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.Yale University Press: Yale.
Lovink, Geert and Nathanel Tracz (eds.). 2011. Critical Point of View. A Wikipedia Reader. Institute of Network Cultures: Amsterdam.
Okoli, C., 2009. A Brief Review of Studies of Wikipedia in Peer-Reviewed Journals. In: 2009 Third International Conference on Digital Society. p 155–160.

Issue coordinators

Eduard Aibar, lecturer, Arts and Humanities department, and IN3 researcher, UOC
Mayo Fuster Morell, postdoctoral fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

Publication guidelines

Articles must not exceed 5,000 words and must contain the following information:
+ Title
+ Abstract (200 words) containing the basic aspects and results of the paper.
+ Keywords (between 4 and 6)
+ Body of the article, divided into sections and subsections
+ Bibliography
To ensure a blind review of articles, the following documents should be submitted
separately:
+ Author’s details (name and surname, professional affiliation, professional postal address, e-mail)
+ Brief CV (100-200 words) and photograph
Articles may be submitted in Catalan, Spanish and English.
For more information, please visit the Author Guidelines section of the website
(http://www.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/digithum/about/submissions#authorGuidelines).

Submission process

You need to register as an author on the journal’s website in order to submit work (http://www.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/digithum/user/register). Once registered, enter the username and password you receive during the registration process to begin the submission process. In Step 1, select the section available, and accept the prior conditions for submission and copyright. In Step 2, enter the metadata (title, abstract, keywords). In Step 3, attach the original. You can leave Step 4 empty if there are no more files, but you need to go on to Step 5 to complete the process.

Peer-review

Articles selected by the editors will first be assessed by at least two members of the Editorial Board or recognised experts in the subject appointed by the editors.

Indexing

Digithum is the open-access scientific e-journal produced by the UOC’s Arts and Humanities department. It is published every year in May.
The journal is listed in the sector’s leading scientific journal impact and assessment databases:
+ MIAR (ICDS: 4.079) Database identifying and assessing citation of humanities and social science journals
+ Carhus Plus + Scientific journal classification system developed by the Catalan government’s University and Research Aid Management Agency (AGAUR)
+ MLA – Modern Language Association International Bibliography A subject index for books and articles on modern languages, literatures,folklore and linguistics
+ ERCE Spanish humanities and social science journals assessment portal
+ Latíndex (Catalogue) Online regional information system for scientific journals from Latin American, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal
+ Redalyc Network of scientific journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal
+ E-Revistas Database of Spanish and Latin American scientific journals (CINDOC-CSIC)
+ DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals (Lund University Libraries)
+ Ulrich’s periodicals directory Reference source for the world’s periodical publications
+ Dialnet Portal to disseminate Ibero-American scientific production from the University of La Rioja
For more information on indexing, visit:
http://www.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/digithum/about/editorialPolicies#custom0