About the Journal

By comparing the languages of the world, we gain invaluable insights into human prehistory, predating the appearance of written records by thousands of years. The traditional methods for language comparison are based on manual data inspection. With more and more data available, they reach their practical limits. Computer applications, however, are not capable of replacing experts' experience and intuition. In a situation where computers cannot replace experts and experts do not have enough time to analyse the massive amounts of data, a new framework, neither completely computer-driven, nor ignorant of the help computers provide, becomes urgent. Such frameworks are well-established in biology and translation, where computational tools cannot provide the accuracy needed to arrive at convincing results, but do assist humans to digest large data sets.

The journal "Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice" offers tutorials and discussion notes devoted to the topic of computer-assisted approaches to language history and diversity. The tutorials cover a broad range of topics, ranging from introductory notes on programming, via examples for data-sharing and re-use, up to code examples for complex analyses using software like Python and R

The journal appears in a hybrid form in Open Access free of charge. Articles are first published in our web log with the blog portal Hypotheses (https://calc.hypotheses.org). Contributions to the blog are published as electronic journal articles in two issues per year.

Given the peculiarity of the topics covered in the journal, and the limited circle of people able and willing to contribute, the journal at the moment does not carry out extensive peer reviews. Instead, people willling to contribute are kindly asked to contact the editors and propose their topics to us. The editors assist in copy-editing the articles and make sure that the content follows open science principles.