Computational Humanities Research (CHR) was founded on the premise that a strong community of scholars, method developers, and software creators is essential for innovative, responsible computational work. As Editors-in-Chief (EiCs), we look back at a year in which the CHR journal emerged: methods-forward, data-grounded, and openly reproducible.

In 2025, we published work that made computation answer humanistic questions rather than the reverse: local alignment for poetic meter; information-theoretic detection of formulaic text; critical audits of large historical newspaper datasets; software for reasoning over uncertain dates; protocols that render medieval authorship testable; and careful evaluations of LLMs on literary style and sentiment. We have published original research papers, registered reports and software papers, many of which reflect domain-specific evaluation standards while keeping the journal methodologically plural and discipline-agnostic.

We are deeply appreciative of the scholars who shared their ideas, research, and time as themed issue editors, authors, and reviewers and our associate editors, the team at CUP, and our board for their guidance, patience, and generosity. This retrospective takes a look at what worked, what did not quite work, and what comes next.

Retrospective

This first year’s journal trajectory is perhaps best captured by three highlights.

The journal hosted three methods-forward thematic issues – Expanding the Toolkit: Large Language Models in Humanities Research, Missing Data in the Humanities, and Computational Narratology – which together traced how computational approaches can reshape long-standing humanistic questions while remaining sensitive to disciplinary context. The themed issues chart complementary directions for computational humanities: Expanding the Toolkit foregrounds LLMs as tools and collaborators in humanities research; Missing Data in the Humanities confronts the structural incompleteness and bias of cultural data by adapting quantitative models of missing data and combining them with critical historical interpretation; and Computational Narratology brings narratology, digital humanities, and AI into conversation to analyze, model, and generate narratives across media, languages, and cultural contexts.

Across the themed issues and our regular submissions, we published eighteen open access articles so far in 2025 (Computational Narratology still pending), making new datasets, code, and analytical workflows available without barriers to readers, researchers, teachers, and practitioners.

In parallel, our sponsorship of the CHR conferences enabled a vibrant space for presenting, testing, and critiquing this work in person and online, reinforcing the journal’s role as both a publication venue and a hub for the broader computational humanities community.

We also stumbled across several challenges that we continue to work on. As articles emerge, we are continually looking at new ways in which to ensure maximum visibility for published work and we have made good progress in spotlighting research this year. We are aware that the focus on themed issues risks overshadowing that the journal maintains an open call for articles. Though we have adjusted the website and attended conferences to share more information about the open call, there is still more work to do.

Peer review has taken longer than expected, and we need to further develop our strategies to accelerate this timeline. We recognise that peer review relies on voluntary labour and that events in one’s life can change the timeline. We believe that a major added value of the journal is its ability to develop a rapid peer review process to meet the needs of a fast-paced research environment in computational fields.

Looking ahead, we see it as our responsibility as EiCs to work actively with the community to develop more, and more diverse, thematic issues. This means seeking out topics, methods, and collaborators that do not sit comfortably within our own preconceptions of what counts as “computational humanities proper” and using the journal as a space where those boundaries can be challenged and redefined in dialogue with our authors and readers. Please reach out with ideas and feedback. We are always listening.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to colleagues who have engaged with CHR. The community’s willingness to share their expertise and to engage as authors, reviewers, and readers is what makes CHR possible. A special thanks to Jess Miorini and Hannah Steer whose work behind the scenes is the backbone of CHR.