As the DH Benelux conference enters its sixth edition, and its research is maturing, we wanted to offer participants the opportunity to publish more elaborate accounts of their work. Since the digital humanities community does not have many journals yet, we thought that a dedicated DH Benelux Journal could fill a gap here, and allow us to showcase some of the best work that is happening in our region.

Taking inspiration from our colleagues at Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (CLIN) in the general setup of the journal, we invited authors of accepted conference abstracts to submit full papers to the journal, that were then subjected to a more stringent review process. For each new issue, our goal is to complete the submission, review, and publication processes before the next edition of the conference. Naturally, we will evaluate and tweak this cycle to best serve the interests of the DH Benelux community as our journal keeps maturing as well.

In line with the ideals of open science and open source software, we decided to make the journal available in Open Access – publishing all of the contributions in this issue under a Creative Commons “Attribution 4.0 International” license. Taking this one step further, we decided to only offer authors open formats for submitting the final versions of their articles: namely LaTeX and Markdown – formats that are increasingly gaining currency in the field. We are convinced that by sharing some of the formatting workload between authors and editors as such, we can make our journal’s publication workflow more sustainable in the long run. Aware of the fact that this may introduce somewhat of a learning curve for our authors, we are committed to lowering the threshold as much as possible, by offering detailed formatting instructions on the journal’s website, and helping authors where necessary.¹ We thank Folgert Karsdorp, Lars Wieneke and Joris van Zundert for preparing the publishing pipelines based on these formats, and for helping us set up and style the journal site.

We hope you enjoy this first issue, and we look forward to continuing this exciting new chapter for digital humanities research in the Benelux.

Amsterdam

Wout Dillen
Marijn Koolen
Marieke van Erp