Does the world really need yet one more academic journal? It does when there is an unmet need for disseminating certain types of work. Andy Guess, Kevin Munger (two political scientists) and I (a communication scholar/sociologist) are starting the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media (link to temp Web site while the permanent one gets set up). The journal publishes quantitative descriptive social science. It does not publish research that makes causal claims. Descriptive work can be very important and also very resource-intensive to produce, yet notoriously hard to publish in existing outlets. We want there to be an outlet where people can free up the tremendous amount of information residing on their machines from data sets they have collected, but that they don’t write up and disseminate, because there is currently no place to do so. Thus our journal. JQD:DM is an open-access no-fee publication (for at least the first two years, ideally indefinitely). Check out the journal site for more on the motivation and more thoughts from Kevin on where he sees it fitting into the scientific enterprise.
{ 5 comments }
oldster 10.08.20 at 5:47 pm
Request for clarification?
“The journal publishes quantitative descriptive social science. It does not publish research that makes causal claims. Such work can be very important, but also very resource-intensive to produce, yet notoriously hard to publish in existing outlets.”
From the larger context, I suspect that “such work” refers to “quant. descriptive soc. sci.,” and does not refer to “research that makes causal claims.”
But given how English pronouns typically function, “such work” would normally refer to the closer antecedent, i.e., “research that makes causal claims”, which is the opposite of what you mean. (I think??)
Eszter Hargittai 10.08.20 at 5:56 pm
Thanks. I wondered if that would get misinterpreted. Indeed, it is the descriptive work that is hard to publish. I’ve edited the post from “Such work” to “Descriptive work” to reduce potential confusion. I also changed “but also very resource-intensive” to “and”.
oldster 10.08.20 at 7:10 pm
Pronouns — they’re the worst!
In my first note, I forgot to say: congratulations on the new journal, and good luck!
Bill Benzon 10.09.20 at 12:13 pm
Wonderful! I know much of the most interesting work in the so-called digital humanities (a term whose reference is so broad as to be all but meaningless) is fundamentally descriptive in character, though it may be decked out with interpretive claims.
I note that much of biology rests on rich descriptions of life-forms and life-ways. Without that descriptive work, Darwin would have been helpless. And then we have Watson and Crick, 1953, in which they characterized the shape of the DNA molecule – fundamentally descriptive. To be sure, that descriptive work is of a very different character from what your journal will be about, but description is description and it is fundamental. If you don’t have a good description of phenomena, how can you possibly investigate causality?
I’ve been hollering for more description in literary criticism, mostly description of individual texts, which is closer to biologist’s descriptions of life forms than what your seeking. But, as I say, description is description.
As a final note, in his early work Chomsky made a distinction between descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy. In terms of that description, much of linguistics is descriptive rather than explanatory.
Daniel Hirschman 10.12.20 at 7:24 pm
This is fantastic! Are there plans to make other related journals, e.g. “Journal of Quantitative Description: Sociology”?
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