Publications

The World-Historical Dataverse is pleased to publish scholarly papers related to the collection and analysis of historical data on topics in economic, social, and political life, and in health and environmental affairs. The Dataverse Papers are reviewed by the Dataverse Advisory Board.

Journal of World-Historical Information

Editors:
Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh
Ruth Mostern, University of California – Merced
Vladimir Zadorozhny, University of Pittsburgh

The Journal of World-Historical Information (JWHI) is a peer-reviewed, semi-annual , electronic journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary project of creating and maintaining a comprehensive world-historical data resource. The journal operates under the guidance of the Center for Historical Information and Analysis, the collaborative network which is creating the data resource. The data resource addresses several centuries in time with data aggregated up to the global level. The journal focuses on the particular problems of historical data—their heterogeneity, the high cost of collecting, digitizing, and documenting such data and, on the other hand, the high value of historical data for temporal analysis of the past and projection into the future.

While other journals address information science, techniques of geographic and temporal analysis, and methods in historical studies, JWHI is distinct in focusing attention on the interplay of these aspects of creating, curating, and analyzing world-historical data. It gives particular attention not only to the collection and housing of existing data but to the transformation of data to generate comprehensive and comparable data for the world and its subunits over the past several centuries. As a result, the overall project requires innovations in archive design, data definition, data transformations, and theoretical connections among the natural- and social-science disciplines on which it draws. The project also requires advances in estimation and simulation of missing data.

The Journal publishes four principal types of articles: editorial essays, articles on published or immediately forthcoming datasets, reviews of published datasets, and methodological essays. The articles and reviews on datasets may include discussion of creation of the dataset, implications of the dataset for information science, the nature of historical documents, and historical methods and analysis applicable to the dataset. Articles on methods may include the architecture of a world-historical archive or methods for data collection, cleaning, documentation, analysis, and visualization. Methodological articles are to be general statements rather than focusing on a single dataset. Detailed criteria for acceptance of each type of article are to be posted on the journal’s website.