Academic journals are supposed to help in the dissemination of knowledge through the publication of high-quality research. Such scholarship, however, is often behind paywalls for example the Modern Language Quarterly, PMLA, and the South Atlantic Quarterly are all journals that need subscriptions or university access to read the texts hosted on their platforms. According to the Duke library website, the average cost for one highly cited article for “an unaffiliated researcher is $33.41” (“Library 101 Toolkit”). This makes research, especially for budding academics not associated with a university library, an expensive endeavor. This is where open-access journals come in. Open-access journals allow free and immediate use of academic books, articles, and other texts without access fees “combined with the rights to use these outputs fully in the digital environment” (“Springer Nature”).

The Journal of Cultural Analytics is one such online open-access journal dedicated to promoting scholarship that applies “computational and quantitative methods to the study of cultural objects (sound, image, text), cultural processes (reading, listening, searching, sorting, hierarchizing) and cultural agents (artists, editors, producers, composers)”. It published its first issue in 2016 featuring three sections: articles that offer peer-reviewed scholarship, data sets about discussions associated with new data related to cultural studies, and debates regarding key interventions surrounding the computational study of culture. This open-access journal aims to “serve as the foundational publishing venue of a major new intellectual movement” and challenge disciplinary boundaries (“Journal of Cultural Analytics”). It allows authors to retain the copyright of their published material and grants itself the right of first publication with their work under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CCBY). Due to its open-access model, authors do not get paid for publishing with it. One of its very first articles, “There Will Be Numbers” by Andrew Piper has to date garnered 2852 views and 602 PDF downloads (“Journal of Cultural Analytics”).

This journal is published by McGill University’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Its editor is Andrew Piper, a professor at McGill’s Languages and Literatures department and director of the Cultural Analytics lab. Its remaining editorial board is made up of digital humanities professors from across different North American universities such as UT Austin, Cornell, CUNY etc. Despite its affiliation with McGill, this journal is hardly ever mentioned in the university’s halls nor are students made aware of its existence. The most I heard about it was in my “Introduction to Digital Humanities” seminar when one of my class readings was from this journal. Thus, there seems to be almost no effort on McGill’s part to promote this journal to students. Delving deeper into this issue, the problem seems to be that despite its interdisciplinary nature this journal is viewed as catering to a niche audience i.e., digital humanists and not all humanities scholars. Considering it is published by a particular humanities department at McGill instead of in collaboration with all such programs might explain why it is less known and promoted. As an open-access journal, especially one in a computational humanities field, it should be better advertised to students at least in the university that publishes it so that they may better avail its resources.

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