Transformations. A DARIAH Journal launches second issue on “The Past”

How do digital methods shape the ways we understand, preserve and interpret the past? The second issue of Transformations. A DARIAH Journal, dedicated to “The Past”, brings together five articles exploring this question. Following the inaugural issue on workflows, the new issue examines both the possibilities and the challenges of working with historical sources and cultural heritage in a digital world.

As guest editors Agiatis Bernardou and Georgios Artopoulos explain in their introduction, “these contributions suggest that the past is never simply waiting to be retrieved. It must be identified, organised, connected, preserved and interpreted.”

The published articles address topical issues: information extraction from bibliographic data, data migration as a memory preservation process, data feminism in the work with historical newspapers, critical perspectives on historical statistics, the interaction between wikibase and memory institutions collections. Together, they provide novel methodological insights in the spirit of Open Science, making their datasets available for reuse.

This second issue expands the scope of the journal by introducing new submission types. Authors now have the possibility to submit data papers and workflow papers – and so they did in Issue 2. Specific evaluation criteria have been developed for these two genres. The journal’s editorial board has provided guidance to authors in order to facilitate their adoption, and continues to explore avenues that make it possible to foster academic recognition for all actors involved in knowledge production.

The call for papers for the third issue of the journal, on the topic of engagement, is open until December 31, 2026, and a call for papers for a special issue will be launched soon. Stay tuned!