International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA)
Special Issue: The Urgency of the Digital
Thematic volume planned for July 1, 2025
Proposal Submission Deadline: June 15, 2023
This special issue focuses on the critical and urgent use of digital tools, interfaces, media, and methods for the study and design of Islamic architecture, cities, and the built environment. Over recent decades, architectural historians, architects, and other specialists of the built environment have drawn increasingly on digitized databases, digital data, and processing software to reimagine the history, documentation, design, and construction of buildings, gardens, and cities wholesale. Representations of historical, contemporary, razed and never-built structures are now fully realizable, and massive corpora of information that once took many months or years to sort can now be analyzed in seconds. Yet, digital tools, infrastructures, and databases bring their own set of concerns. Databases, like all archives, do not merely contain information, they are information. And as such, they bear the marks of the epistemologies that shape them. Digital files are always remediated, meaning that they are the products of multiple human interventions, just as analogue media are. Some of the platforms that facilitate virtual reality simulations of architecture, cities, and transcontinental migrations enjoy an uncomfortable kinship with the pervasive governmental and private surveillance technologies in use today. Artificial intelligence (AI) has enormous potential to transform the way that architects, city planners, and historical preservationists work, and yet racial, gendered, ethnic, and religious biases in the datasets that machine-learning algorithms employ raise questions about the ramifications of these undertakings. Digital frameworks enable more expansive, multi-layered, and speculative investigations of buildings, cities, and spaces, but they also demand rigorous scrutiny.
This special issue encourages contributions that address the urgent promises and risks that digital infrastructures, tools, and approaches hold. The editors invite paper proposals that employ a wide spectrum of approaches, including but not limited to spatial mapping, social network analysis, distant reading, photogrammetry, 3D printing, virtual reality and augmented reality simulators, humanities gaming, and electronic publishing, among other topics addressing contexts in or involving the Islamic world. Paper proposals may also examine how digital collections, interfaces, and software bear on the study and design of Islamic architecture, cities, and the built environment. Contributors are asked to reflect on what the translation of sources and evidence into electronic data entails, how these acts upend questions and procedures that are fundamental to our fields, and what pressing limitations and potentials the digital brings.
Articles offering historical and theoretical analysis (Design in Theory; DiT) should be between 6000 and 8000 words. Those on design and practice (Design in Practice; DiP) should be between 3000 and 4000 words. Practitioners, urbanists, art historians, specialists in literary and religious studies, archivists, librarians, data scientists, software developers, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and historians whose work resonates with the topic of this special issue are welcome to contribute discussions that address the critical themes of the journal. Collaboratively authored articles are also welcome. Please send a title and a 400-word abstract to the guest editor, Yael Rice, Amherst College (IJIA25Digital@gmail.com), by June 15, 2023. Authors of proposals will be contacted by July 1, 2023, and may be requested to submit full article drafts for consideration by January 30, 2024. All submissions will undergo blind peer review, editing, and revision. For detailed author instructions, please consult: www.intellectbooks.com/ijia.
Visit Society of Architectural Historians for more information.