Call for contributions – Historical Life Course Studies
Historical Life Course Studies is the electronic journal of the European Historical Population Samples Network (EHPS-Net) . The journal is the primary publishing outlet for research involved in the conversion of existing European and non-European large historical demographic databases into a common format, the Intermediate Data Structure, and for studies based on these databases. The journal publishes both methodological and substantive research articles.
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During the past decades historians, sociologists and demographers have started to construct an impressive amount of large historical population databases, which allow scholars to investigate fascinating new research questions and to address old questions in a new and innovative way. These databases contain longitudinal data on the micro-level, which allow researchers to ‘reconstruct’ life courses of individuals in the past. Accordingly, it has become possible to compare the incidence, likelihood, timing and sequences of demographic and socioeconomic events (e.g. birth, leaving home, start of the career, promotion, becoming a head of a household, marriage, birth of the first child, divorce, retirement, death) for different individuals through time and space. Moreover, most of these databases allow us to investigate how individuals had influenced each other’s behavior (‘linked lives’) and how the socioeconomic and demographic context shaped opportunities and created barriers for individuals in the past. Accordingly, it has become possible to study nuptiality, fertility, family and household formation, migration, residential patterns, social mobility, ageing and mortality from a historical life course perspective.
Although the construction of large historical databases has provided many new opportunities in the field of historical population studies and has led to an impressive amount of new publications, scholars in the field have suffered from the fact that there has been minimal collaboration and coordination in terms of database construction. Consequently, every database has its own structure, its own variable names and its own form of documentation, even though most of these databases are based on the same type of source material and contain highly comparable information. In order to generate more collaboration between database makers and managers from different research groups around the world and to facilitate cross-national and cross-cultural research, the European Historical Population Samples Network (EHPS-Net) was established in 2011. One of the primary aims of this network is to spread and implement the so-called Intermediate Data Structure (IDS), a standard data format for large historical databases, which allows us to use the same data extraction programs on all databases stored in IDS format. Historical Life Course Studies has been established within the EHPS-network and aims to stimulate and facilitate the implementation of IDS and to publish the results from (comparative) research with the help of large historical databases.
While Historical Life Course Studies functions as the primary publishing outlet of scholars from the EHPS-Net, all articles dealing with large historical databases from authors worldwide are welcome. The journal publishes not only empirical articles, but also descriptions (of the construction) of new and existing large historical databases, as well as articles dealing with database documentation, the transformation of existing databases into the IDS format, the development of algorithms and extraction software and all other issues related to the methodology of large historical databases. We encourage scholars to share their data and syntax on the website of the journal, enabling the international community of scholars to profit from them; at the same time, authors can receive useful feedback on data handling issues, which is not available in regular journals, that will enable them to improve their own work. Historical Life Course Studies is a no-fee open access journal, which means that all articles and materials are available for free and that authors face no charges. This is only possible due to the financial support from the European Science Foundation (ESF), the Scientific Research Network Historical Demography (Research Foundation Flanders) and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. The only criterion for publishing in Historical Life Course Studies is academic quality. Quality is evaluated by way of a double-blind peer-review process, as papers are reviewed by members of the editorial and scientific review board and external specialists. The members of the editorial board and scientific review board are leading scholars in the field.
It is our ambition to develop Historical Life Course Studies into a leading journal in population studies, which reflects and stimulates worldwide advances in the field. We thank you for your attention and invite you to submit your own exciting scholarly work through the website of the journal: http://www.ehps-net.eu/eform/submit/article_submission#
Koen Matthijs & Paul Puschmann
Editors
Read our previous articles:
Dimensions of Rational Decision-Making during the Demographic Transition; Aranjuez (Spain) Revisited
David Reher, Glenn Sandström
A Tale of Two Transcriptions: Machine-Assisted Transcription of Historical Sources
Gunnar Thorvaldsen, Joana Maria Pujades Mora, Trygve Andersen, Line Eikvil, Josep Lladós, Alicia Fornés, Anna Cabré
Extending the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) for longitudinal historical databases to include geographic data
Finn Hedefalk, Lars Harrie, Patrick Svensson
The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) for Longitudinal Historical Microdata, version 4
George Alter, Kees Mandemakers