Journal of Cultural Analytics Enters New Chapter with CDH, Joins Open Journals Collective

In January 2026, Princeton University's Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) began serving as publisher of the Journal of Cultural Analytics (JCA), a leading open-access publication in computational approaches to culture. Today, CDH announces JCA’s vision for expanding cultural analytics scholarship amid rapid technological change and the launch of a new website, supported by Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI).

"The Journal of Cultural Analytics has been instrumental in advancing computational methods in the humanities," said Meredith Martin, faculty director of the CDH and professor of English at Princeton, who serves as one of the journal's three editors alongside Amelia Acker (Rutgers University) and Tanya Clement (University of Texas at Austin). "We are honored to lead JCA's continued evolution and grateful to Andrew Piper for his pioneering work in establishing this field-changing, scholarly venue."

Building on a Strong Foundation

Founded by Piper at McGill University's Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, JCA has published groundbreaking data-driven research about culture since 2016. The journal encourages transparent research practices, including open sharing of data and code. It has become a cornerstone publication for scholars working at the intersection of digital humanities, computational social sciences, and computational approaches to culture.

"The idea for the journal was born in 2015 as a response to a shared sense that our field needed a venue dedicated to the critical use of computation to study culture," said Piper. "After a decade of growth, the journal has far exceeded my hopes. I'm extremely happy to see it continue under the leadership of the new editors and its new institutional home at Princeton's Center for Digital Humanities."

Looking Ahead: Expanding Scope and Impact

JCA is broadening its vision to serve an ever-evolving interdisciplinary and international scholarly community invested in cultural study and the methods by which we interrogate the digital in culture – especially in the age of AI. Central to this vision is the commitment to publishing work that goes beyond method for method's sake, asking instead how computational approaches to culture at scale can reshape what we know and how we know it.

The editorial board has expanded to 43 scholars representing institutions across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, reflecting JCA’s commitment to international perspectives and increasing representation from junior scholars. This expanded scope will support the journal’s growing focus on multi-lingual and multi-modal approaches to culture.

A new Special Features section, edited by Laura McGrath (Temple University), will highlight shorter, timely essays on computational cultural analysis written in an accessible style for non-specialist audiences, designed to spark discussion on new methodologies, datasets, or research.

JCA will deepen its focus on critical engagement with data, which is increasingly significant for AI researchers returning to smaller, human-curated cultural models. Welcoming a new data editor, Sarah Rief-Connell (Princeton University Library), JCA will revise its data-essay and dataset-review format in collaboration with the scholarly “data collectives” (such as Post45 and 19thC Data Collective), and provide a directory of datasets for cultural studies.

Upcoming Special Issues will explore topics ranging from computational humanities in the Global South to data-driven approaches to poetry and a retrospective on ten years of the JCA. The journal is currently accepting Special Issue proposals for 2027.

New Infrastructure for Open Access, Community-Led Publishing

The transformative support from Schmidt Sciences’ HAVI program has enabled JCA's growth and modernization, expanding the editorial team with new roles for graduate students—providing both recognition and compensation for the labor required to run an academic journal and an opportunity to train the next generation of computational humanities scholars. The grant has also enabled the journal to migrate to Janeway, an open-source publishing platform developed by the Open Library of Humanities, featuring a redesigned user interface and customizable workflow management system.

In this new phase, JCA maintains its commitment to diamond open access—free to read and free to publish, with no article processing charges (APCs) or publishing fees for authors or universities. JCA has also joined the Open Journals Collective, a coalition of libraries and university-based publishers that launched in March 2025, providing journals with technological support, financial sustainability, and community governance through a library-funded model that keeps research freely accessible and journals editorially independent.

"I'm thrilled to have such a prestigious Princeton journal carrying the banner for diamond open access as part of the launch collection. We're excited for JCA, and for the promise of the new, sustainable funding model OJC is delivering," said Matthew Kopel, Princeton's Open Access & Intellectual Property Librarian, who also sits on the Open Journals Collective Library Board.

More information about the journal's new direction, upcoming issues, and submission guidelines can be found on JCA's newly launched platform at https://culturalanalytics.org.

Editorial Team

Editors

• Meredith Martin, Princeton University
• Tanya Clement, University of Texas at Austin
• Amelia Acker, Rutgers University

Special Features Editor

• Laura McGrath, Temple University

Data Editor

• Sarah Reif-Connell, Princeton University Library

Graduate Editorial Assistants

• Cecelia Ramsey, Princeton University (Managing Editor)
• Odalis Garcia Gorra, University of Texas at Austin
• Haiqi Zhou, McGill University
• Emilien Arnaud, Princeton University

Former Editorial Assistant

• Katrin Rohrbacher

About the Center for Digital Humanities

Princeton's Center for Digital Humanities, founded in 2014, advances computational and data-intensive humanities scholarship through collaborative research, innovative pedagogy, and community building to create a more just future. The center develops better practices in technological development and research while bringing humanistic perspectives to data science applications.

About the Open Journals Collective

The Open Journals Collective is a growing coalition of libraries and university-based publishers providing sustainable, community-led alternatives to commercial academic publishing. Through diamond open access and collective funding models, OJC supports hundreds of journals while ensuring research remains freely accessible to all.

About Schmidt Sciences

Schmidt Sciences is a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to accelerate scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with the most promising tools to support a thriving planet. The organization prioritizes research in areas poised for impact, including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, biosciences, climate, and space—as well as supporting researchers in a variety of disciplines through its science systems program. The Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute (HAVI) intends to spur innovative, domain-specific research outcomes from humanities scholars through the integral application of AI-inspired tools and techniques, as well as produce insights from the humanities that will advance the development of AI.