World cultures
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
World Cultures is an electronic and paper journal of cross-cultural studies. It was founded in 1985 by Douglas R. White as editor until 1990, when Greg Truex became editor, followed by J. Patrick Gray and Peter Peregrine (1991-1995). Pat Gray remains the current editor. The current publisher is William Divale. The journal publishes cross-cultural research articles and has published computerized codebooks and datasets on the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, Western North American Indians, an Atlas of Archaeology, and numerous other topics. Numerous software programs for cross-cultural analysis have also been published.
Part of the purpose of the journal is to provide codebooks and data that are in the public domain for scientific use, at minimal cost of distribution, both to support scientific work and instructional use. To this end, the CD containing all past issues, datasets and software is available from publisher William Divale at minimal cost ($10), and new as well as legacy issues of the journal are appearing at the free on-line site at the California Digital Library. The largest of the databases supported by the journal to date are the contributed multiauthored coded data for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, now numbering 2,002 coded variables on 186 societies by over 90 different contributing authors.
