Author Guidelines

Submissions should be made electronically through this website.

Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript. Failure to do so may delay the processing of your submission. Please note that there are no set article lengths, though authors are encouraged to be as concise as their subject matter and approach allows.

Article types

• Research articles must present previously unpublished arguments or the outcomes and application of unpublished original research in the application of digital technology to humanities subjects. These should make a substantial contribution to knowledge and understanding in the subject matter. Research Articles are refereed.
• Method articles should outline, test and discuss the application and significance of new techniques or critique or propose modifications to existing techniques within the Digital Humanities. In contrast to research articles, method and review articles may discuss techniques that have not yet been applied within the Digital Humanities, provided their (potential) relevance to the field is (made) clear. Method Articles are refereed.
• Commentary articles should reflect upon or critique current events or methods and approaches related to the intersection of computation and the Humanities. Authors interested in submitting a commentary piece should discuss the content with the editor before submitting a manuscript. Commentary Articles may be refereed.
• Review articles can cover topics such as current controversies in or the historical development of the intersection of computation and the Humanities. Articles should critically engage with the relevant body of extant literature. Review Articles may be refereed.

Peer review

All submissions are initially assessed by an Editor, who decides whether or not the article fits the scope of the journal and is suitable for peer review. Submissions considered suitable are assigned to one or more independent experts, who assess the article for clarity, validity, and sound methodology.

In recognition of the fact that many digital projects are immediately identifiable to experts in the field, the journal operates a single-blind peer review process. This means that authors may or may not be identifiable to referees (we encourage but do not require anonymisation), but referees remain anonymous unless they voluntarily identify themselves.

We encourage referees to review the article as soon as possible, preferably within four weeks. Reviewing is, however, an inherently slow process as referees can be difficult to find.

Reviewers are asked to provide formative feedback, even if an article is not deemed suitable for publication in the journal. Based on the reviewer reports, the editor will make a recommendation for rejection, minor or major revisions, or acceptance. Overall editorial responsibility rests with the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, who is supported by an expert, international team of editors.

Copyright notice

All articles published in this journal are published using a CC-BY 4.0 licence. By submitting your article to this journal, you are giving us a right of first publication. Others may reuse this material in accordance with the CC-BY licence. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique is commonly contacts for reprint permission. In keeping with the CC-BY licence, we always give this permission.

In keeping with this licence, authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book) with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

Publication fees

Digital Studies/Le champ numérique is published by the Open Library of Humanities. Unlike many open-access publishers, the Open Library of Humanities does not charge any author fees. This does not mean that we do not have costs. Instead, our costs are paid by an international library consortium.

If your institution is not currently supporting the platform, we request that you ask your librarian to sign up. The OLH is extremely cost effective and is a not-for-profit charity. However, while we cannot function without financial support and we encourage universities to sign up, institutional commitment is not required to publish with us.

Sometimes editors of special issues have access to subvention funds from grants and similar sources of support. While such funds are not required and have no impact on editorial decision-making, the journal welcomes voluntary support and can work with fund-holders to ensure support is compliant with the rules governing their funding.

Publication cycle

Digital Studies/Le champ numérique is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publicly available.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.

Structure of submissions

Submissions normally should be structured as follows (bold are required):

• Title (entered into submission form)
• Authors (entered into submission form)
• Abstract (entered into submission form)
  
• Keywords (entered into submission form)
• Competing interests (entered into submission form)
• Article (uploaded in Word format only)
• Title
• Abstract
• Keywords
  
• Main text
  
• Appendices (optional)
• Acknowledgements (optional)
• Ethics and consent (if applicable)
• Author contributions (required for multiple-author papers)
• Works cited

Title

Please ensure that your submission has a title that adequately describes its content.

Author name, affiliation, and email address

Author names should be provided in the form and order you wish them to be published. Please include an affiliation for each author.

For authors associated with an organisation (e.g. university, research institute, corporation, etc.), the affiliation is the name of the organisation with an optional geographic identifier (i.e. city, region, or country).

For authors without an organisational affiliation, please use a relevant geographic identifier (i.e. city, region, or country).

Abstract

Articles must have the main text prefaced by an abstract of approximately 300 words summarising the main arguments and conclusions: a good abstract provides the reader with a complete overview of the article. This must have the heading ‘Abstract’ and be easily identified from the start of the main text.

The abstract should also be added to the article metadata during submission.

Keywords

Please provide a list of up to six keywords or phrases that describe the subject matter of your submission, separated by semicolons.

The keywords should also be added to the article metadata during submission.

Main text

The body of the submission should be structured in a logical and easy-to-follow manner. A clear introduction section should be provided that allows non-specialists in the subject an understanding of the publication and a background of the issue(s) involved. The remainder of the article should be divided into appropriate subdivisions and labelled with descriptive headers. As a rule, no more than four levels of subdivision (and subheadings) should be used. Subheadings should use sentence case. If you use more than one level of subdivision and subheading, please indicate this clearly using a style hierarchy (e.g. “Heading 1,” “Heading 2,” “Heading 3” in Word or LibreOffice).

Acknowledgements (optional)

If your article has acknowledgements, please place these in a clearly-labelled section after the main body and before the references.

Competing interests

Competing and conflicting interests must be declared on the submission form. Guidelines for competing interests can be found here. Please describe these (if present) in a clearly-labelled section after the main body and before the references.

Ethics and consent (if applicable)

Research involving human subjects, material, or data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and the authors should include a clearly labelled statement after the main body and before the references detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval (if applicable). Experiments using animals must follow national standards of care. Further information is available.

Author contributions (multiple-author papers only)

Articles written by more than one author should describe the contributions of each author. We require the NISO CRediT contributor role taxonomy. This taxonomy should be placed in a clearly labelled section after the main body and before the references. Please use the following format. Authors are identified by lowercase initials only (without periods) separated by commas:

• Explanation for author order: i.e. “Authors are listed in alphabetical order,” “Authors are listed in descending order by significance of contribution,” “Authors are listed in a randomised order,” etc.;
• Identification of the corresponding author: e.g “The corresponding author is xy”;
• A table describing author roles, followed by the initials of the relevant author, with each author separated by commas. A complete list of roles is found in the example below. More than one author may be listed after each role; individual authors commonly fulfil more than one role. Omit any roles not relevant to the article. Please contact the editors if you would like assistance with this requirement.

The following is a hypothetical example using all elements in the typology for a six author paper written by ab, cd, ef, gh, ij, and kl.

• Conceptualization: ab,cd,ef;
• Methodology: cd,ef;
• Software: gh,ab,cd;
• Validation: ij;
• Formal Analysis: kl,ab,cd;
• Investigation: ab,cd,ef;
• Resources: ef;
• Data Curation: ab;
• Writing – Original Draft Preparation: ab,cd;
• Writing – Review & Editing: ab,ef;
• Visualization: ef;
• Supervision: ab;
• Project Administration: xy;
• Funding Acquisition: ab.

Details of what these terms mean can be found on the NISO site.

Works cited

All references cited within the submission must be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition, Author-Year System and listed at the end of the main text file. Authors are strongly encouraged to use a citation manager to manage and format their references (e.g. Zotero, Paperpile, Mendeley), though they should then unlink such entries before submission (see your citation manager documentation for details). The journal reserves the right to charge a fee to authors whose references require significant copy-editing, formatting, and/or research during production.