About the Journal

The Journal of the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA), ISSN 3006-6492, is the peer-reviewed open-access journal of DHASA. Since its foundation in 2016, DHASA has become the official network of digital humanities scholars in Southern Africa. DHASA members come from a wide variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences.

The journal is published yearly (minimum), where the proceedings of the bi-annual DHASA conference is published in the odd-numbered years (e.g. DHASA2021) and special thematic issues appear in the even-numbered years. Our journal follows the diamond open access approach, that means that the content is freely available (under a Creative Commons license), and no we do not charge our authors for the publication, distribution or archiving of their articles (APCs).

Target Audience

With the JDHASA, we create a high-quality and accessible platform to showcase and engage with digital humanities scholarship in Southern Africa. The publication is targeted at scholars in Digital Humanities, students, lecturers and teachers, library and information professionals, and the interested public.

Authorship Criteria

We invite scholars and individuals from grassroots movements that engage in shaping the digital humanities sphere in Southern Africa, to submit contributions to the journal. The DHASA Journal focuses on the quality of the research output presented towards the advancement of the field, and not on the institutional affiliation of the authors.

Types of Submissions

JDHASA publishes original research related to Digital Humanities (see below). We welcome all scholarly reflections within the broader gambit of the Global South, meaning we not only encourage contributions from the geographical location of Southern Africa but also those viewpoints that represent the issues and concerns of digital humanities from this regional and idea sphere.

Aims

One of our key aims is to develop a ‘methodological commons’, “providing guidance in the development of standards and expertise to promote best practice in digital humanities teaching and research.” Another aim is to create a much-needed dialogue and critical reflection on digital humanities teaching and research to provide a voice and channel for debates on pertinent issues.

The DHASA Journal is an important initiative aimed at making the research output of our members and other interested scholars publicly available.

If you are interested in joining DHASA, please follow this link.

Scope

Our definition of Digital Humanities includes areas such as computational linguistics, human language technologies and literary studies, digital arts, and media. Additionally, fields like technology criticism, digital library studies, information, and archive studies, are some of our core areas of research and application. However, the list is by no means exhaustive.

“Digital Humanities is a mode of inquiry and scholarship. It seeks to engage traditional questions using computational tools. It seeks to disseminate information in digital formats. And it engages questions of how reliance on computational tools shapes the questions asked and interpretations offered in the humanities.” Jeri Wieringa. Even more pressing the role of the “Humanities” in the “Digital” requires scholarly engagement because: “Ours is an era in which the humanities have the potential to play a vastly expanded creative role in public life. Digital Humanities asks what it means to be a human being in the networked information age and to participate in communities of practice, asking and answering research questions that cannot be reduced to a single genre, medium, discipline, or institution. Digital Humanities represents a major expansion of the purview of the humanities, precisely because it brings the values, representational and interpretive practices, meaning-making strategies, complexities, and ambiguities of being human into every realm of experience and knowledge of the world.” Digital_Humanities (2012) Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. MIT Press, Cambridge.

We interpret digital humanities broadly, as a conglomerate of different fields, approaches, and perspectives. We include, but do not limit ourselves to, computational linguistics, human language technologies, literary studies, digital arts and media, technology criticism, digital library, information and archive studies.