Literary and Linguistic Computing

About Literary and Linguistic Computing

Literary and Linguistic Computing — Journal Profile

Literary and Linguistic Computing (cited as Lit. Linguist. Comput., DOI stem 10.1093/llc) was the founding journal of what is now called digital humanities. Launched in 1986 by the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and published by Oxford University Press, it gave the emerging field of humanities computing its first dedicated, peer-reviewed home: a quarterly journal for research on computing and information technology applied to literature and language. Under this title it ran for twenty-nine volumes, from 1986 to 2014. In 2015, with volume numbering continuing unbroken, it was renamed Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH) to signal a scope that had outgrown literary and linguistic studies alone. This profile documents the journal under its original title — the title carried by this JournalsWorld record, with ISSN 0268-1145 (print) and 1477-4615 (online) — and explains its continuation, because the journal itself never ceased: only its name changed.

Founding: A Journal for Humanities Computing

The association behind the journal predates it by thirteen years. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing was founded in 1973, when applying computers to texts still meant mainframes, punched output and concordances printed on fan-fold paper. By the mid-1980s the personal computer, the Text Encoding Initiative's precursors and a growing conference circuit had created a research community that needed a journal of its own. Literary and Linguistic Computing was founded in 1986 as the ALLC's official journal, published by Oxford University Press, and it quickly became — alongside the American Computers and the Humanities (founded 1966 for the Association for Computers and the Humanities) — one of the two defining periodicals of humanities computing. A later bibliometric history of the field (Sula and Hill, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2019) treats the two journals' contents between 1966/1986 and 2004 as the primary documentary record of the discipline's early history, which is a fair measure of this title's archival importance.

In 2005 the journal became the official journal of both the ALLC and the ACH, reflecting the increasingly international organisation of the field, which in the same year formed the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). The ALLC itself later took the name European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH), and the journal is today published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH.

Scope in the Literary and Linguistic Computing Era

The journal's stated remit was material on all aspects of computing and information technology applied to literature and language research and teaching: results of research projects, descriptions and evaluations of techniques and methodologies, and reports on significant work. In practice, its pages defined the methodological core of humanities computing:

• Authorship attribution and stylometry — statistical approaches to disputed authorship, including work improving Burrows's Delta method (Smith and Aldridge, 2011) and function-word studies of classical texts.
• Lexicometry and vocabulary studies — measures of lexical richness and diversity (Tweedie and Baayen, 1998, "How variable may a constant be?") and statistical study of large text collections.
• Corpus linguistics and concordancing — construction and analysis of literary and linguistic corpora.
• Text encoding and scholarly editing — the journal was a natural home for work around the Text Encoding Initiative (founded 1987) and for digital editions, including projects of the Electronic Beowulf type that its community produced.
• Natural language processing for humanities texts — tagging, parsing, morphological analysis and machine-assisted translation of literary and historical language.
• Computing in literary and linguistic teaching and research infrastructure — tools, databases and early digital libraries for the humanities.

Long and short papers reported theoretical, methodological, experimental and applied research, and the journal also carried reviews. What distinguished it from a computer-science venue was the direction of fit: the humanities question came first, and the computational method had to earn its place by answering it.

The 2015 Rename: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

By the early 2010s the field had renamed itself — "humanities computing" had become "digital humanities" — and its centre of gravity had widened from text to images, audio, geospatial data, cultural heritage collections and born-digital material. A journal titled Literary and Linguistic Computing no longer described its own contents. In 2015 the journal was therefore renamed DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, in an editorial rebranding led by editor Edward Vanhoutte, explicitly to address a wider audience. The change was of title and ISSN only: the volume sequence continued (volume 30 in 2015; volume 40 in 2025), the publisher remained Oxford University Press, the DOI stem remained 10.1093/llc, and the renamed journal became the official journal of the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations while remaining the EADH journal. The new title was assigned its own ISSNs — 2055-7671 (print) and 2055-768X (online) — which is why this site holds Digital Scholarship in the Humanities as a separate record with those identifiers. Researchers should treat the two records as successive titles of one journal: cite pre-2015 articles as Literary and Linguistic Computing and later articles as Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, exactly as printed.

The Journal Today, Under Its New Title

Under the DSH title the journal remains an international, peer-reviewed quarterly publishing original contributions on all aspects of digital scholarship in the humanities, including long and short research papers and reviews of books and resources. Oxford University Press's current journal metrics (2025) report an Impact Factor of 1.0, a five-year Impact Factor of 1.1, a Scopus CiteScore of 3.0, and a median of 63 days from submission to first decision; the Editor-in-Chief is Edward Vanhoutte. Two scope boundaries stated by the publisher are worth knowing before submitting: the journal does not publish work-in-progress reports or descriptions of projects, tools, techniques or methodologies as such, and bibliometric or artificial-intelligence research is out of scope unless it has theoretical relevance or a direct application to digital humanities. These present-day details belong properly to the DSH record; they are given here because anyone searching for Literary and Linguistic Computing as a submission destination is, in fact, looking for DSH.

Metrics and Standing of the LLC Title

The indicators attached to this JournalsWorld record, derived from OpenAlex, are an h-index of 72, with 1,473 works indexed and 23,281 citations — high figures for a humanities journal, reflecting how heavily the field's foundational methodological papers are cited. Stylometric and text-analytic methods first published or consolidated here are now standard tools, implemented in software used across literary studies, history and linguistics, and the journal's run is routinely mined as evidence in histories of digital humanities itself. A caution applies in the other direction too: citations to the journal are split in databases between its two titles, so neither title's isolated metrics capture the whole — the honest summary is that one continuous journal, under two names, has been a central venue of its field since 1986.

How to Access the Archive

The complete run, under both titles, is on Oxford Academic. Articles carry DOIs under the 10.1093/llc stem (DSH articles use suffixes such as fq… in place of the older volume-page pattern), so any citation can be resolved through a DOI resolver. Institutional libraries in the humanities commonly hold the print volumes from 1986 onward; when searching catalogues, remember that the print ISSN changed at the rename, and older bibliographies abbreviate the title variously as Lit. Linguist. Comput. or LLC.

For Authors

You cannot submit to Literary and Linguistic Computing, because the title closed in 2014 — but the journal you want exists. Manuscripts on digital scholarship in the humanities, including computational literary and linguistic research of the kind this title pioneered, go to Digital Scholarship in the Humanities through Oxford Academic, where the current author instructions, editorial board, open-access options and charges are maintained. Fit matters more than nostalgia: work must present completed theoretical, methodological, experimental or applied research with a clear humanities contribution, not a project report. Verify all submission details on the publisher's page before submitting, since policies, editors and metrics are updated there and are not fixed by this historical profile.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Literary and Linguistic Computing still published? The journal continues, but since 2015 under the title Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Volume numbering, publisher and DOI stem continued across the change.

Why are there two JournalsWorld records? Because the rename brought new ISSNs (2055-7671 / 2055-768X for DSH, against 0268-1145 / 1477-4615 for LLC), the titles are catalogued separately — here and in library systems generally. They are successive titles of one journal, not two competing journals.

What did the journal publish? Peer-reviewed research on computing applied to literature and language: stylometry and authorship attribution, corpus and lexical studies, text encoding and digital editing, and NLP for humanities texts, from 1986 to 2014.

Who published it? Oxford University Press, for the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (now the European Association for Digital Humanities); from 2005 it was also the journal of the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

How do I cite a 1990s article from it? As printed: journal title Literary and Linguistic Computing, volume, issue, pages, and the DOI (10.1093/llc/…), which still resolves on Oxford Academic.

Inside the Field the Journal Built

The journal's run coincides with the professionalisation of humanities computing, and its contents track the field's expanding toolkit decade by decade. The 1980s volumes are dominated by the era of the concordance and the mainframe-era text archive: scholars encoded texts by hand, counted words and forms, and argued about what a machine-readable text even was. The founding of the Text Encoding Initiative in 1987 — a community effort in which this journal's readership was deeply involved — gave that argument a standards track, and encoding, markup and digital scholarly editing became durable journal themes. The 1990s brought the personal computer, the web and the first large digital libraries and editions; papers shifted from whether to compute to how to evaluate what computing produced. By the 2000s, when the journal served both the ALLC and the ACH, statistical authorship studies, corpus methods and language technology sat alongside digital editions and infrastructure papers, and the community's joint conferences had become the field's main meeting ground. The 2019 history by Sula and Hill, mining this journal and Computers and the Humanities across 1986–2004, shows the two titles jointly documenting that whole arc — one reason libraries and historians treat a complete run of Literary and Linguistic Computing as primary evidence for how digital humanities formed, not merely as a container of old articles.

Individual papers also had long methodological afterlives. Work on lexical richness in the late 1990s, including Tweedie and Baayen's 1998 analysis of vocabulary measures, is still cited whenever a new text-measurement tool is validated, because it demonstrated that popular constants of style were not constant at all. Authorship-attribution research in and around the journal — from function-word studies of classical and early modern texts to the 2011 optimisation of Burrows's Delta — fed directly into the stylometry software now used well beyond literary studies, in history, law and forensic linguistics. And the journal's TEI-era editing papers underpin practices that digital editors still follow. A humanities journal whose methods sections are cited by computer scientists, statisticians and lawyers has earned its h-index the hard way.

The Journal's Community and Editorship Today

Because the journal continues as DSH, its present-day community is visible on the publisher's pages. The Editor-in-Chief is Edward Vanhoutte, who led the 2015 rebranding; the senior editors are Wendy Anderson and Paul Gooding of the University of Glasgow (Gooding also serving as reviews editor), with associate editors at Portsmouth, Cologne, Nanjing Normal University and Darmstadt, and an editorial board spanning the field's senior figures in Europe, North America and beyond, including honorary members drawn from the journal's founding generation. That structure — an association journal, edited by working scholars, published by a university press — is itself a survival from the LLC era, when the ALLC's journal was an instrument of a learned society rather than a commercial product line. Authors considering the journal today are joining the same conversation the 1986 volume opened, under its modern name and scope statement; the archive ensures that a 2026 paper on language models for historical texts sits, in the same volume sequence, a few dozen volumes away from a 1986 paper on concordances — a continuity few journals in any field can match.

Reading the Two Titles as One Journal

Scholars citing this literature should adopt one simple discipline: cite the title printed on the article. A 1998 paper is a Literary and Linguistic Computing paper and a 2018 paper is a Digital Scholarship in the Humanities paper, even though both sit in one Oxford Academic archive, share a DOI stem, and belong to one volume sequence. Bibliometricians face the mirror-image problem: any evaluation of the journal that counts only one title understates its influence, and any that merges the titles without noting the 2015 change misstates its history. The cleanest summary for evaluators is the one this profile uses — one journal, founded 1986 as Literary and Linguistic Computing (ISSN 0268-1145 / 1477-4615), continued from 2015 as Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (ISSN 2055-7671 / 2055-768X), published throughout by Oxford University Press for the field's European association, with the American association joining in 2005 and the international ADHO association adopting it at the rename. Researchers tracing a debate — over stylometric method, over encoding standards, over what counts as digital humanities at all — will routinely need both halves of the run, and the archive's unified search makes that practical in a way the print era never allowed.

Finally, a note for readers who arrived here looking for the field itself rather than for submission details. The fastest introduction to what this journal has stood for is to sample one landmark from each era of its run: a concordance-and-counting paper from the first volumes, an encoding or digital-edition paper from the TEI years, a stylometric methods paper from the 2000s, and any recent DSH issue. The questions change — from "can a computer count this?" to "what should a computer be asked to mean by this?" — but the standard the journal set in 1986 has not: the humanities problem leads, the method must justify itself, and the argument must be one that scholars without the author's software can still judge.

Verification Note

The facts that carry this profile — the 1986 founding by the ALLC, the 2005 joint sponsorship, the 2015 rename with continuing volume numbering, the current editorship and the publisher's stated metrics — are drawn from Oxford University Press's own journal pages and from the peer-reviewed history of the field published in the journal itself in 2019. One identification point was checked with particular care: some secondary listings attach the old title's ISSNs to the renamed journal, but article-level records since 2015 consistently give Digital Scholarship in the Humanities its own ISSNs, 2055-7671 and 2055-768X, and this profile follows those records.

Profile compiled from official and scholarly sources: Oxford University Press journal pages for Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (about, metrics and editorial board); Sula and Hill (2019), "The early history of digital humanities", DSH 34 (Supplement 1); Duke University Libraries' digital humanities timeline; Harvard's digital humanities resources pages; and the JournalsWorld record for the title. Facts that could not be verified from those sources have been left out or are stated as not publicly disclosed.