Editors' Note

We present the critical fora in our Fall 2022 issue with warm anticipation of the conversations they will extend and inspire. In this issue, readers will find two distinct constellations of scholarly debate around major considerations of the field. Our issue's two forums, "New Approaches to Comics" and "Computational Periodicals," pick up important questions about form, seriality, mediation, and access that represent long-standing interests for the journal. We have been delighted with the generosity of our many contributors to this issue, and would love to discuss its riches on Twitter @AmPeriodicals!

In 2016, the forum "Digital Approaches to American Periodicals" (American Periodicals 26, no. 1) offered "a snapshot of key issues and debates currently facing periodical scholars engaged in digital work." Since then, millions more newspaper pages have been added to the Library of Congress's Chronicling America database, and collections like the Digital Library of the Caribbean have vastly expanded our knowledge of Western Hemisphere periodicals. Since then, interdisciplinary artificial intelligence conferences like Stanford's Fantastic Futures have connected computational and humanistic scholars in new collectives. Since then, digital projects celebrating periodical histories and formats have proliferated: think of your favorite example and ping us on Twitter!

Moving beyond the medium of digitization, our "Computational Periodicals" forum celebrates the computational opportunities of technical processes like term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), digital curation tools such as Omeka, and the metadata resources of repositories like ProQuest. In a short essay that moves from "JSTOR and chill" to James Baldwin, Kristin Moriah's generous introduction to the forum reminds us that our virtually-mediated scholarship is never free from the hands and minds of human interlocutors. For Moriah and the forum's four additional contributors, "digital tools can help us to learn from and about the past while building towards a more equitable future."

Both Demetra McBrayer and Charline Jao revisit Black periodical histories from the vantage point of digital tools. McBrayer's use of TF-IDF to examine Mary Ann Shadd Cary's Provincial Freeman, moving from analysis of economic terms and values to consider cultural histories, "beg(s) us to consider any results in the context and through scholarship on the lived experience of the persons whose work we analyze." In this essay, the most technical of tools enables a deeply ethical and humanistic argument for nuanced attention to the warp and weft of Black print tradition in North America.

Jao's essay marks our very first "Pedagogy & Practice" entry by introducing "Periodical Poets (periodicalpoets.com), a catalogue of over 700 poems printed in New York City periodicals run by Black editors in the nineteenth century." As a feature, Pedagogy & Practice honors the practical work we do with periodicals, in classrooms and public venues, in libraries and cultural heritage institutions, online and face-to-face. With Jao's wide-ranging Periodical Poets as an inaugural example, we anticipate a bright future for this feature!

In Marisol Fila and Sigrid Anderson's collaborative essay, the authors synthesize and extend the insights of critical archival studies and critical cataloging to propose systematic attention to database mediations, accessibility choices, and collection principles in any study of digital periodicals. Their ambitious survey of interdisciplinary scholarly conversations runs through ethical claims for attentiveness and reflection in work with any digital database. A critical database studies project calls for "more attention to the contours and limitations of the databases we use—a critical methodology for approaching databases in general and more studies that illuminate the particulars of specific databases." As always, American Periodicals will remain a welcoming home for explorations responding to Fila and Anderson. Across all these examples, cutting-edge computational affordances intersect with historical periodicals, invigorating periodical methods and inviting negotiations of small and large, culture and technology, historical moments and contemporary tools.

This issue's other forum, "New Approaches to Comics in Periodical Media," addresses the opportunities and approaches for thinking text, image, and circulation together in the study of comics in periodicals. Convened by Felix Brinker and Alex Beringer, the forum's essays span centuries, styles, communities, and methods to propose exciting new avenues...