Digital humanities have combined successfully computing with all the disciplines of the humanities. Early initiatives like the Text Encoding Initiative led to the creation of massive digital text archives, followed by multimedia archives described by rich metadata. In addition to this digitizing movement, researchers started to apply methods from the humanities to analyze digital entities, such as computer mediated interactions of actors in online social networks. This trend is amplified by the open data movement which give access to very large corpora of data, in particular to those produced and/or collected by governments.
The availability of digital data describing either traditional humanities objects or digital objects has increased vastly the possibilities for conducting quantitative analysis in the humanities, leveraging tools from statistics, data mining, data visualization, and so on. While off-the-shelf techniques can be applied in the simpler cases, data coming from the humanities are generally complex in many ways and call for specific methods. Such methods must be designed in interaction between data scientists and researchers from the humanities, possibly in an iterative way that extends progressively the underlying model in order to account for all the complexity in the data.
The objective of this special issue of the Journal de la Société Française de Statistiques is to describe the state-of-the-art and the ongoing research mixing humanities and statistics. We are particularly interested in situations in which a natural question posed in e.g. history has led to the development of new statistical methodology, models or methods. We are also interested in applications of state-of-the-art statistical methods to humanities objects showing non trivial insights on those objects, in particular when those insights could not be obtained by classical methods.
We are welcoming submissions that mix any discipline of the humanities with statistics interpreted in a broad sense. Prospective authors are invited to contact the guest editors as early as possible in order to validate that their work falls into this broad scope, for instance by emailing a one page abstract.
Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the author guidelines available on the journal website and using the latex template provided there. The pdf file of the manuscript should then be sent to both guest editors via email. Papers can be written in French or in English. Manuscripts will be peer reviewed by researchers of the relevant disciplines of the humanities and by researchers in statistics.
English 
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