Together with my colleagues Pablo Abend, Mathias Fuchs, Ramon Reichert and Karin Wenz, I recently initiated the publication of a new journal:

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory. The newly established journal provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation in digital media studies. It invites reflection on how culture unfolds through the use of digital technology, and how it conversely influences the development of digital technology itself.

We will soon circulate our first call for papers on “Digital Material/ism“. The second issue will be dedicated to “Quantified Self”.

The journal is a research platform for those who are interested in the interdisciplinary field of digital media studies. It involves topics such as New Materialism, Gamification, Surveillance and Privacy, Big Data, Sensory Ethnography, Quantified Self, Extimacy, and Digital Cartography. This however, is a non-exhaustive list, and new topics will continuously supplement these themes due to the dynamic of the research field. The journal’s goal is to create a cross-disciplinary repository on the interconnection between research fields such as media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, sociology, gender studies, anthropology, game studies, media/art history and information science. It welcomes contributions addressing the relevance of interventional approaches, such as research by design and media archaeology, or input related to material culture studies, actor-network theory, critical code studies and software studies.

Digital Culture & Society seeks contributions that display a clear, inspiring engagement with current debates in theory and/or methodological issues. Emphasising the relevance of new practices and technology appropriation for theory as well as methodology debates, the journal also encourages empirical investigations.

The journal’s structure reflects the editors’ aim to spark and incorporate the discourse on digital media practices, theory, history and methodologies. Each issue consists of 3 main sections:

1. The thematic section of each issue is dedicated to an overarching topic, which will be examined through interdisciplinary contributions. Topics are specified in the respective call for papers. The editors aim to include a range of articles that involve theoretical and/or methodological debates, where appropriate, in the light of authors’ own empirical investigations.
2. “Entering the Field” is dedicated to the presentation of empirical work and potential research fields in digital media studies. The editors have created this section to provide a platform for researchers who are not able to provide a full-fledged paper yet, but would like to initiate a discussion concerning their research material or methodological insights.
3. “In Conversation with …” presents dialogues between the editors and authors of recently published works in the field of digital media studies. Thereby, the overall topic of the published work is integrated and located within the wider frame of the journal’s emphasis on digital culture and society.

Submission procedure
Initial submissions should be abstracts only. The editors invite contributions which react to the topic/s suggested in the respective call for papers. Early stage research might be suggested for the section “Entering the Field.” It should show a relation to the CfP, although the main argument may be less developed than in the case of the papers for section 1. The editors will select abstracts; and authors will then receive an invitation for the submission of a full paper. Authors who are invited to submit a full paper will receive further information on the journal’s guidelines (citation, formatting, etc.). The full papers will be peer-reviewed and the authors will receive the feedback of the reviewers for a final revision of their paper. The publisher will provide final editing.

Submission guidelines
The initial abstracts should be 300 words in length. Authors are asked to submit a short biographical note indicating their institutional affiliation. Invited full paper submissions should be 6.000-8.000 words in length for the main section. Submissions to “Entering the Field” should be no longer than 2.500 words.

Information about the publisher
Digital Culture & Society will be issued as a printed journal and distributed online by transcript. The publisher is based in Germany and focuses on interdisciplinary research in media studies, cultural studies and media/art history.

Visit the transcript homepage for more information! Our first call can be found here.