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Project Overview

Three Anecdotes about Special Issues

  1. When I began a literature PhD program in 2015 after a couple years working in tech, it seemed like every lecture and seminar I attended introduced some unfamiliar combination of words, a phrase whose meaning I could not fully discern from its constituent parts: “surface reading”; “race and/as technology”; “queer temporality.”1 These powerful concepts and others originate in special issues of humanities journals and circulate as critical keywords, shorthand, and shibboleths in scholarly conversations, often as common coin without citation or explanatory context. In some cases, as with “Afrofuturism” (coined in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, “Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture” edited by Mark Dery and expanded and publicized in a special issue of Social Text on Afrofuturism edited by Alondra Nelson), the terms move far beyond the academy. Despite their significance, special issues are difficult to search for and discover using existing databases.

  2. Earlier this year, I received an email notification about a newly published special issue of American Literature on “Critical AI: A Field in Formation.” This publication announcement was the first I’d heard of the issue, though I’d been working on an article related to that topic. I am privileged to have access to various academic networks and affiliations with well-resourced institutions and organizations, and I have also follow the journal closely, having published an article in one of its special issues just the previous year, subscribing for email updates, and later participating in a small weeklong workshop with the journal’s longtime editor. Even with all these access points, I was caught unaware of the special issue until it was already complete.

  3. While compiling submissions data for Post45 Journal, an open-access peer-reviewed journal I now co-edit, I found a troubling discrepancy between the journal’s historical acceptance rates for single articles (around 15%) and articles appearing in special issues (over 90%). Although some gap between these rates might be justifiable (or at least explainable) due to varying demographics and circumstances of submission (authors in special issues tend to be more senior; they also receive more thorough pre-peer review editing by guest editors), those explanations seem insufficient. The idea that articles reviewed for special issues are simply higher in quality strikes me as implausible or incomplete, and I suspect that the acceptance rate gap reproduces or amplifies inequalities associated with opportunities and resources for professional networking and access to secure employment. Though the journal, in principle, treats all peer-reviewed articles the same way, all review processes also include discretionary elements for editorial judgment.2

Need

The scholarly frictions I sketch above are common but represent only a small subset of the challenges that researchers of all kinds—from undergraduate students to senior professors, independent scholars, writers, and journalists—encounter in attempting to engage with scholarly publications and special issues in the humanities using library resources. Despite the academic and broader cultural importance of themed special issues in the humanities for establishing conceptual shifts, convening major conversations, and advancing significant debates, special issues remain relatively opaque. They are inconsistently and spottily indexed in databases, rarely listed on journal websites, and often incompletely enumerated even when they do appear. The policies, procedures, and histories about their assembly, formations, and contexts are overwhelmingly obscured and inaccessible.

As a result, students and scholars currently have few options for accessing and understanding special issues. There’s no clear or simple way to assemble answers to basic questions about special issues in a single journal’s history, let alone across a topic, subfield, or discipline. The three anecdotes above illustrate three problems with the structure of information about special issues in the humanities:

  1. Post-publication, they are challenging to access and discover for students, readers, and researchers.

  2. Their calls for papers are scattered and poorly publicized.

  3. Their review processes and compilation (whether submissions are closed/invitation-only or open to all) can compound inequities and amplify gaps in privilege and prestige.

To demonstrate the first problem with an example, what if a student of American literature wanted to find out what special issues American Literature has published, or even just how many? Here are the steps I took to compile a list before giving up (for now):

  • On the journal’s JSTOR page, special issues are labeled, but coverage is incomplete (limited to the first 71 years of the journal and missing the past 25 years). Five special issues are listed on this page. The preface to the earliest one indicates that “Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill” (volume 65, no. 3 (1993)) was “the first special issue in the sixty-five-year history of American Literature”; without this lucky break, I would not have been certain if it was the first special issue or only the first special issue listed on the site (413). Browsing more issues, however, reveals that American Literature had previously published themed forums—special sections that make up only part of an issue and that aren’t listed on the journal site. The issue immediately preceding the “first special issue” of the journal contains one of these themed forums, on the question, “What Do We Need to Teach?” (66, no. 3 (1994): 325-361).

  • The Duke University Press page for American Literature complements JSTOR’s collection, including only special issues since 2000. While the site includes tables of contents for these recent issues, manually browsing each of the approximately 100 issues since 2000 is the only way to compile a list of special issues and special sections in that period. On the Duke UP main page for the journal, several special issues appear under the heading “Buy An Issue,” but the earliest one in the list is from 2008, and the list omits, for example, volume 92, no. 4 (2020), which contains “COVID-19 Forum: Pandemic Reading,” a special section that makes up the majority of the issue (alongside two one-off articles and several book reviews).

  • The MLA International Bibliography, the definitive database for publications in languages and literatures, indexes special issues—but not with publication type metadata. Instead, special issues are listed as “Journal Articles” that simply have “[Special Issue]” appended to the title field. Searching “articles” in American Literature with “special issue” in the title field between 1993-2024 yields only 14 results, with the earliest in 2011 (leaving out all the special issues in the 1990s and 2000s).

As this lengthy chronicle demonstrates, special issues are unreasonably difficult to collate and trace even in a leading, well-indexed literary studies journal.

Opacity of Special Issue Publishing and History

  • Journals are rarely transparent about how special issues are assembled. Were some or all of the authors invited to submit by guest editors? Was there an open CFP for the special issue? It’s often unclear whether journals are even open to unsolicited special issue proposals.
  • Even well-connected scholars can miss CFP announcements, which are distributed unevenly across a variety of platforms and modes: individual journal websites, publisher websites, word-of-mouth, direct invitations, forwarded emails, social media, and various CFP websites (some of which are difficult to navigate)
  • Information about published special issues is spotty and decentralized. Many journal and publisher websites don’t have full lists of special issues. Even full-text databases are missing consistent tagging and metadata on special issues. Finding quick answers to basic queries about special issues is usually infeasible (for example, what special issues in field X or related to topic Y have been published in the past Z years?). See also Open but not Discoverable, notes for a talk on some of these issues that I presented at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

The situation is not much better for upcoming special issues. Calls for Papers (CFPs) for special issues-in-development are also difficult to access and locate (and consequently, for those looking back, it becomes unclear which published special issues were assembled through open CFPs vs. by invitation through insider networks). CFPs for special issues appear in various locations, none of which are definitive, and many of which are challenging to navigate. Perhaps the largest host for calls for papers in the discipline of English/Anglophone literary studies is the Penn CFP (Calls for Papers) site. Though a valuable resource, this site has major issues: the search function is a wrapper for a Google search, which allows for extremely limited sorting and filtering via keyword search. Because the site also includes CFPs for conferences, fellowships, and prizes, and the journal category is lumped together with anthologies and edited collection books, there’s no simple way to view only special issue CFPs, let alone filter out irrelevant ones. The site does not allow sorting by deadline and or filtering by field, area, topic, or selected journals. It has been a useful and important resource in my field, but a limited and not particularly usable one. Other alternatives (like MLA Profession CFPs; journal, publisher, and scholarly organization websites; listservs; announcements on social media; word-of mouth; direct/closed personal invitations; and scholarly communities/social networks like H-Net and MLA Commons) are even more limited in scope, coverage, accessibility, and functionality. This lack of transparency around special issue CFPs disproportionately disadvantages junior and minoritized scholars, who may have less access to the scholarly networks in which special issue CFPs and private invitations circulate.

As the third problem I list above suggests, uneven access to publishing in special issues is an equity problem, as special issues are advantageous to humanities scholars for several reasons.

Benefits of Publishing in Special Issues

  • Potentially larger audiences and greater impact
  • Participation can lead to other opportunities, like invitations to give talks, join panels, and participate in workshops
  • Higher acceptance rates. To be clear, a higher acceptance rate for special issues does not imply lower quality or relaxed standards, and could result from various factors (some of which I outline in the bullet points below). I believe that discrepancies between special issue and regular acceptance rates are a major equity issue & likely common among leading journals (we certainly have this problem at Post45), but I suspect that they typically result from bias and structural issues rather than active impropriety. Either way, we need to address the problem.
    • Journal editors might approach articles more generously or with positive expectations, viewing the articles as already having been vetted by guest editors
    • Journals may follow different processes for special issues and one-off articles
    • Guest editors often provide developmental editing and mentoring before submission, so special issue articles may be more polished or immediately legible to reviewers
    • Guest editors might advocate for their authors in conversations with journal editors, helping to tip the balance in ambiguous or borderline cases (even with double-anonymous peer review, journal editors have a great deal of latitude and discretion, e.g., in desk review and adjudicating split decisions between reviewers).
    • Even if guest editors exert no influence, journal editors may be biased toward acceptance. After approving a special issue proposal & investing time and effort into the project, no one wants a special issue to fall through. However, leading humanities journals often boast low acceptance rates (frequently under 20% and sometimes under 10%); if special issues actually hewed to those accepetance rates, they’d frequently be left with too few articles.
    • Special issue contributors are not a representative sample of the profession

Barriers to Publishing in Special Issues

  • Some are closed / invitation only
  • Poorly circulated information, even with open CFPs
  • Special issues may be linked to events with open CFPs (like conference panels or roundtables), but later close to new contributors
  • The process of assembling special issues may exacerbate inequalities by favoring scholars:
    • with resources to build extensive networks (e.g., time, stable employment, funding, and personal circumstances that allow for frequent travel and conference attendance)
    • with well-connected advisors/mentors/colleagues
    • affiliated with prestigious institutions
    • who are senior and/or already have strong reputations

Purpose

Using modern web technologies, I plan to create a definitive, centralized, and well-structured digital repository of open calls for papers and historical metadata about journal special issues in the humanities, in the form of a website/web application.

After the planning phase of the project, I will seek funding to hire and mentor student research assistants to conduct a complete survey of special issue metadata for major Anglophone literary studies and media studies journals (with a principle of selection informed by multiple resources, including authoritative sources like the MLA Directory of Periodicals and SCMS, crowdsourced data like the Humanities Journal Wiki, and discussions with scholars and librarians).

At the same time, I will also develop a first public version of a web application that will be useful for humanities researchers at all levels. The site will be live and available online with open-source code as soon as a basic version is ready, and research assistants and I will work iteratively to add new features and improvements to the site (in software engineering lingo, via continuous integration) and incorporate data as we collect it (both manually and automatically through web crawlers). We will then launch the site and publicize it widely as a research resource to accompany and complement library databases, make scholarly conversations more approachable, and help academics discover opportunities for scholarly publication.

Audience

This project will initially focus on academic journals in literature and media studies, and the potential audience includes a substantial and diverse group of researchers, including high-school students and teachers working on fundamental research and writing skills; undergraduate students taking humanities courses and conducting independent research; graduate students completing coursework, presenting at conferences, and beginning to publish articles and reviews; writers, literary critics, and book reviewers; and professors, lecturers, and independent and contingent humanities scholars. Future iterations of the project will expand to other fields in the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences.3

Possible use cases for this web application include:

  • Answering basic questions about journal publication history.
  • Familiarizing oneself with new fields (for example, as a graduate student or an interdisciplinary scholar engaging with research areas beyond one’s formal training).
  • Assessing and demonstrating the existence of scholarly interest in topics or questions, for persuasive academic genres like dissertation prospectuses and introductions, book proposals, and grant applications.
  • Surveying scholarly conversations to establish context when writing in various genres, including seminar papers, articles, conference presentations, dissertations, prospectuses, proposals, and fellowship applications.
  • Researching and understanding disciplinary history, including by gaining a sense of scholarly social and professional networks and journals’ editorial preoccupations, interests, and characters.
  • Familiarizing oneself with journals’ publication standards, procedures, and styles, for instance, in preparation to pitch a special issue.

Project Director

I am a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and an affiliate fellow in the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. Before beginning this role, I completed a Ph.D. in English at Yale University with the support of a 2021-2022 Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship in Women’s and Gender Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My scholarship focuses on intersections of contemporary American literary, media, and feminist science and technology studies, with a strong basis in archival research. I currently work as an academic journal editor for the open-access literary studies journal, Post45 Journal and Technology and Open Access Officer and a member of the board of directors of its parent organization. My scholarship has immersed me in the academic genres and social life of journal publishing, and has equipped me to critically examine dynamics of scholarly communication and media across disciplines. I also worked as a professional software engineer prior to graduate school, and have kept these skills sharp and current, in part through my work with Post45 to develop its WordPress theme to enable the publication of journal special issues and themed forums/clusters in the journal’s sibling publication, Post45: Contemporaries (see figure below). Six years of experience in journal publishing and a background in web development prepare me to conceptualize, design, and execute robust, scalable, and maintainable open-source web applications using modern technologies, metadata standards, and design patterns according to best practices.

Draft Work Plan

The team for the duration of this project will include me and two research assistants. I will focus on designing and developing the website/web application, while research assistants collect data about special issues. One research assistant (RA) will focus on print journal issues and manual data collection. The other RA will program scripts/web crawlers to automate the collection/compilation and update process for data from disparate public sources of information about special issues (including various CFP listings and listservs, journal and publisher websites and eTOC updates). This data will be made available continuously, once validated.

RAs might assist with contacting journal editors to create a resource guide for special issue proposal policies (noting, for example, which journals accept unsolicited special issue proposals, whether they accept them anytime (like Post45 Journal) or only during an annual window (like Comparative Literature, which reviews proposals only in late spring), and how long their publication timeline extends, ideally including both review timelines and lag between acceptance and publication, which can be lengthy if journals have large backlogs).

Tasks

Completed

Created a preliminary test/sketch/demo application/rapid prototype to experiment with compiling and visualizing special issue information and to practice using D3.js, a popular JavaScript library for creating interactive data visualizations. Available at https://wang-arthur.github.io/special-issues/ (note: does not reflect the planned design for this project)

special issues table

special issues dashboard

special issue dashboard (hover view)

Future

Stage 1

  • Apply for small grants for project funding
  • Hire and train research assistants to collect special issue data. Assistants will prioritize a subset of leading literary studies journals at first, with more to follow.
  • Complete review of existing “competition” (existing sources of information about past special issues & open calls for papers) and conduct brief user interviews with a range of researchers to make decisions about the site’s design, data model, technology stack, metadata standards, and use cases of the web application.
  • Program and release a first public version of the web application with a robust data set and core features, including:
    • Simple and effective interfaces for browsing, searching, sorting, and filtering of CFPs and published special issues
    • forms for users to submit and publicize CFPs
    • admin backend for reviewing and approving user-submitted CFPs and admin backend for populating the site with special issue information we’ve collected
    • guidelines and procedures for open-source contributions and credit (and outreach to digital humanities and MLIS programs to recruit potential open-source volunteers)
  • Site will be public and code will be open access from the beginning to enable feedback and testing, but the project will not be broadly publicized until a full working version is complete.
  • Launch and publicize the site
    • Include plans for future development and features to come
    • Also include info / demos about use cases along with resources like a guide to developing a special issue proposal that compiles policies – these materials will be helpful resources in themselves, but will also double as marketing material helping to publicize the site.

Stage 2

  • Prepare applications/proposals for major grants to sustain and expand the site (covering more journals and disciplines, developing more robust features)

    • One aspect of this work will be exploring ways to sustain the site beyond the funding periods. Another aspect will involve developing an “exit plan” that is faithful to best practices in open-source software development.

      Aside: In my view, the spirit of FOSS (free and open-source software) requires not only that code be made freely and publicly available and licensed for reuse (though those are the most important criteria), but also advance planning to avoid software rot, disappearance, and other forms of inaccessibility (whether intended or not). I will plan thoroughly to ensure that even if I am unable to secure funding to sustain and support the site, it will not automatically become “abandonware” – there will be clear mechanisms, documentation, and procedures in place so others can use, repurpose, or revive the project. Even if the project itself becomes obscure and obsolete, I will have a plan in place to publicize a “postmortem” so others can learn from the project’s failures and mistakes. In my experience, this planning is not typically a part of the proposal process for major grants, but given the substantial scale of public/philanthropic investment required for digital humanities/software projects, it absolutely should be.

  • Continue adding site features
    • Information about journal policies
    • Wiki-like version history and version control for user-submitted data
    • User profiles and settings (e.g., favorite journals for quick filtering and email update notifications)
    • Data export / download / API

Stage 3

  • Seek an institutional host or a financial model for developing and sustaining the application (such as sponsorships from libraries and publishers or acquisition and hosting by a scholarly organization, an academic department or center, or a research library).
  • Release further iterations of the web application to add features like citation graphs, visualizations, and more sophisticated tools for browsing, discovery, and research.

Other Tasks

  • Organize and edit a journal special issue on the influence, history, biases, and social lives of themed journal issues in literary studies. Write an introduction, assemble a group of authors, and convene a workshop or conference panel to develop this collaborative volume.
  • Compose principles and best practices for editing and reviewing special issues and special issue articles equitably, perhaps in collaboration with the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ)
  • Outreach to editors and publishers with invitations to contribute data and information about their journals and special issues
  • Expand to other humanities and social science disciplines

Site Features (in progress)

  • Multiple sources of data
    • submissions from publishers, editors, and other scholars
    • web crawlers to collect data that’s already public but scattered
    • manual upload, direct requests to journals and publishers
  • User accounts/profiles
    • Subscribe for CFP updates (filtered)
    • Contribute data
  • Open source and open data
    • The site code will be publicly available & licensed for reuse and data (all data aside from user data?) will be accessible and exportable.
    • Resilient: even if the site goes defunct, others can restart it / create an identical copy
    • Extensibility: the focus for this resource will be humanistic, but folks from other fields could build on the project and create versions for their disciplines

Primary interfaces

  • CFP browser: easy to filter, search, sort, and otherwise discover relevant CFPs
  • Journal info pages: see a given journal’s policies for special issue submission, open CFPs, and past special issues
  • Historical special issue database
    • comprehensive information about published special issues, including robust metadata
    • Combined with CFP data, this database could also provide transparency around the formation of special issue; there’ll be a public source of info about how special issue X was formed (via open CFP or by invitation only? initiated by the journal’s staff or an outside proposal? associated with particular events, conferences, or meetings?)

Tech Stack

  • Backend
    • SQLModel and FastAPI? (lightweight, high-performance backend and API framework; no need to create a separate API for users)
  • Frontend

Existing resources / “Competition”

Notes

  1. Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best with Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood, eds., “The Way We Read Now,” special issue, Representations 108 (2009); Wendy Hyu Kyong Chun and Lynne Joyrich, eds., “Race and/as Technology,” special issue, Camera Obscura 70 (2009); Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Temporalities,” special issue, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2-3 (2007). Although these special issues are some of the best known in my field from the past twenty years, generating these citations was not straightforward. Scholars often cite the Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s introduction, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” leaving out Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood (and introduction authors are listed in reverse order compared to the issue editors). With Chun and Joyrich’s special issue, the cover image does not list the editors and the printed table of contents is not available on the Duke UP page for the issue. Although Chun is usually associated/credited with “race as technology” due to her sole authorship of the issue’s introduction, Joyrich wrote a preface and I confirmed by checking her CV that she was co-editor of the issue. Furthermore, I typically use Zotero to organize my citations, but in this case, I had to generate the citation manually by referring to the Chicago Manual of Style (which includes citation formats for special issues and articles in special issues), as Zotero has no metadata format for special issues. There is no “special issue” or “issue” item type, nor is there a field in the journal article item type to indicate a source’s belonging to a special issue.\ \ While these citation concerns might seem like minor obstacles, mere annoyances, they seem to result in scholars primarily citing special issue introductions but only referring generally to special issues, which can erase, distort, or obscure the substasntial intellectual work of editing. For reference, I have included without modification below the Zotero-generated citations for the introductions of each of my example special issues:

    Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24, no. 1 (70) (May 1, 2009): 7–35, https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-013; Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–3 (June 1, 2007): 159–76, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2006-029. ↩

  2. Some examples of editorial discretion in anonymous peer review: we anonymize submissions for reviewers but not ourselves; we make judgment calls during desk review and interpret reader’s reports when they come back with split decisions or borderline recommendations (e.g., “I recommend either a revision and resubmission or acceptance pending substantial revision”); and for special issues, we collaborate closely with guest editors, who tend to hold biases toward acceptance and publication, as their authors may be friends and colleagues and they have already approved and endorsed the work. The collaborative process between journal and guest editors can exert subtle or explicit pressure on journal editors to lean toward accepting special issue articles or at least giving them the benefit of the doubt. My point is not that special issues are illegitimate or lower quality (my own journal exclusively publishes special issues, along with one-off articles), but rather, that their formation is opaque and perhaps unfairly advantageous for authors. ↩

  3. Special issues and, more broadly, the scale and contours of journal publishing industry in the natural and life sciences, differ substantially enough from humanities journals that I do not plan to include them in this project. E.g., in a now-deleted post on X/Twitter, a medical school professor described special issues as a tool of predatory publishers, offering no advantages and several disadvantages to junior scholars – he may have deleted this due to push-back from scholars in fields where special issues are important and advantageous, particularly for junior scholars. However, the software will be open source, which would enable others to create and populate their own versions with metadata for other fields. ↩