In this editorial, Scott Jacques describes the changes that accompany the journal's new URL; provides a word cloud that represents all publications on JQCJC.org; and, hyperlinks to the old website as archived on the Wayback Machine.
On September 1, 2020, this journal’s official website moved from JQCJC.org to QualitativeCriminology.com. This represents more than a change of URL. It also corresponds with an informal change to the journal’s title; i.e., from The Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology (JQCJC) to …Qualitative…Criminology (QC). For the story behind that change, see the first footnote in my Letter from the Editor.
More importantly, the old and new URLs represent, respectively, the original and new websites. As I wrote of the old website in my Application for the Editorship: “Weaknesses include the technological and aesthetic features of article submission and, more so, dissemination. For example, articles in an issue are published in a PDF (instead of in separate PDFs on their own webpages), presumably without much metadata; articles are not assigned DOIs; those issues harm the discoverability of articles; the review process is better suited to the early 2000s than 2020.”
The new review process will undergo further improvements in the coming months, though it is already better than before. Otherwise, I am happy to report that the new website is fully complete and overcomes the limitations of the old website: Each publication has its own webpage, backed by appropriate metadata, including DOIs, with Google Scholar set to start indexing us. The new website looks better and has innovative features, which you can read more about in our current and future Editorials.
Though the new website is better, we should not lose sight of the old one. By analogy, our new selves improve with time (hopefully), but we would not want to forget who we were. Preserving the past not only shows where we came from, but also that we can go further; that improvement is always possible; always a goal. For those reasons, the remainder of this editorial provides a summary of the past, and then an archived version of it.
Word Cloud
A “word cloud” is a useful way for visualizing the frequency of words or phrases in text.1 The following cloud represents all publications on JQCJC.org. It gives us insight into the focus of the journal from its first issue to the last published on that website (volume 8 issue 4). I constrained the cloud to the 50 most frequent words.2 Instead of interpreting it for you, I encourage you to analyze it for yourself.
If you want to make your own cloud with JQCJC.org’s publications, below is a Microsoft Word document that has all of them.3
For posterity, I archived every webpage on JQCJC.org using the Wayback Machine. It is the “Internet Archive's web archive, launched in 1996, [and] contains over 2 petabytes of data compressed, or 150+ billion web captures, including content from every top-level domain, 200+ million web sites, and over 40 languages.”4 Below, you will see hyperlinks to the old website’s webpages as of mid-August, 2020. To see an issue as originally published, go to the “Archive” webpage and click onward.5
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