archipelagos

for authors


archipelagos, a journal of digital practice, publishes scholarly articles, digital projects, and digital project reviews related to the Caribbean. We publish one issue per year and accept submissions on a rolling basis.

archipelagos accepts submissions in English, Spanish, and French. We will publish accepted essays in their original language with abstracts translated by our editorial staff. We also welcome contributors to solicit translation services for the full text of their contribution, which we will copyedit for inclusion in the journal.

All submissions should be conform with the Chicago Manual of Style.

Contact: archipelagosjournal@gmail.com


Table of Contents


Submission Guidelines for Articles or Reviews

archipelagos is founded on principles of minimal computing. We encourage our authors to help us avoid redundancy and costly workflows. We understand that unfamiliar environments and formats can be challenging to work with, and these guidelines are a work in progress as we strive for the right balance between our authors’ needs and our mission. Your ideas are most welcome.

General Notes

We ask you to submit your abstracts and articles to archipelagosjournal@gmail.com. Most exchanges with authors will happen through email using this account.

  1. Submissions of individual articles are accepted on a rolling basis. We also welcome proposals for themed sections.

  2. Article submissions must include a bio (or bios for multi-author) and an abstract. Please place these at the bottom of your document. All multimedia content should accompany the initial article submission in a zip file or equivalent.

  3. We are an open access journal. If you are accepted for publication you will receive a copy of our Author Agreement.

  4. Articles are double-blind reviewed by our team of outside peer-reviewers. Digital project reviews are reviewed by the archipelagos Editorial Board. Contributors receive written notification from the editors (accepted, accepted with minor revisions, substantive revisions required or rejected) within two months of submission.

  5. Copyediting begins upon successful completion of the peer-review process. Contributors can expect to receive an updated file with suggestions and queries from our Copy Editor. The revised file must be returned within two weeks of receipt. This will be the final opportunity to make substantive changes to the file. Contributors will receive a final PDF and link to the site close to launch for minor edits.

  6. Throughout the editing and production process, contributors are expected to watch e-mail for any last-minute queries from archipelagos editors. Prompt responses will help to maintain schedules.

File types

Documents

Office formats (.odt, .doc, .docx): In order to minimize the work needed to convert your files into publishable format, please be sure to follow our guidelines and style guide closely. Here are some specific formatting issues that will make our file conversion work tractable:

  1. Please use the Heading styles (i.e. Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.) to separate your sections, beginning with Heading 2. Indicating headings by using bold does not translate well in our transformations. Do not use bold for headings.
  2. Attach links to the main body text (as opposed to spelling them out). In footnotes, spell out the link, but also link to it as you would with text: http://example.com
  3. Remember to use http:// and https:// on your links or they won’t work.
  4. Please make sure to use normal quotation marks. Avoid the use of “smart quotes.”
  5. For hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes use, respectively: - -- and ---.
  6. Do not try to do your own layout on Word. What you see is not what we get. If you need special layout, describe it in prose [in brackets].
  7. Do not insert images manually in the document. Refer to our guidelines for images below.
  8. Do not use data fields or tables in Word. Please see below for our accepted table formats.

Markdown (.md): Publishing is in many ways a game of file conversions. Both our website and PDFs are built from the same Markdown files. We accept plain text files (UTF-8 encoding), written using Kramdown syntax, a version of Markdown, and saved with the .md extension. This helps us keep our workflow light and our file types closer to the production line, contributing in turn to our continued ownership of all aspects of journal production. For some background on our infrastructural choices, and to get started with Markdown, please take some time to read “Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown,” by Dennis Tenen and Grant Whytoff. We sincerely appreciate those who submitt well formatted Markdown to us directly.

Images

At archipelagos we value the richness of our visual culture. If you are submitting your own photography, we ask you to be mindful of frame, color harmonies, and other design elements. Remember also that these files may contain embedded metadata that you might not want to publish. Images accompanying your documents will be open to the review process.

Please provide crisp images with a minimum of 144ppi resolution and at least 800 pixels wide. Please submit your images in JPG format. We accept PNG’s if the image has transparencies or is made of simple colors (i.e. a logo).

Please use the following rubric in your documents, typing each character in the exact order, and filling out the appropriate content inside the quotation marks, and place the block of text where you would like your images to be inserted in your document:

img="my-image.jpg"
title="insert title here"
caption="insert caption here."
url="http://optional-url.com"

N.B. Urls are optional, and should only be used when you want the image to point to a specific resource.

We ask that you name your image files using one or two keywords separated by a hyphen as in the example above. Do not use spaces or capital letters in your file name. Please remember to provide credit line text as needed, particularly for photographs inside the caption.

Video, Sound, and Interactive Media

In order to make our articles and reviews available in PDF, and in order to increase the longevity of the Web files, we separate interactive media from static text and images. For video and sound, we encourage our authors to use a streaming service of their choice. Be mindful of privacy, stability, and copyright concerns when choosing streaming video. When required, we can provide you with a Digital Publication Agreement Form to use with rights holders.

Since archipelagos was born of the need to support emergent forms of digital scholarship, we are also open to including interactive media (e.g., maps, visualizations) in our articles. We ask that you provide us, whenever possible, a full-screen version of your interactive media hosted elsewhere.

In order to include any of these media types, we ask that you send us a screenshot and the appropriate link to the separate content. Please use the same rubric as the one we use for images above, and place the rubric in the place of the text where you would like your screenshot link to appear. The URL should point to the full-screen version (whenever possible) of your interactive media, sound file or video. Whenever appropriate use a screenshot with the play button visible. For example, if it’s a YouTube video, take a screenshot of the full screen version with the red and white play button in the center.

All referenced pages (whenever possible and allowed by the site’s robot.txt file) should point to a specific archived copy at the Internet Archive whenever possible. If a copy does not yet exist, please create one using their “Save Page Now” feature. Let us know if you need help with this process.

Please ensure that all external and internal links in your document are working before submission. Many websites and Web pages disappear or become displaced over time. In order to avoid link rot, we run periodic build tests to ensure the viability of our internal and external links. Despite these measures, some links will be lost in the years to come. In order to minimize the impact on your article, please provide appropriate citations when the links are fundamental to the argument and you cannot provide an archived copy at the Internet Archive.

External Documents

When sharing external documents, do not link to cloud storage services (e.g., Dropbox, Google Docs) or closed-access sources. In these cases, simply cite the documents. If you have permission to use them, you may be able to submit them with your files. We do welcome and encourage links to open institutional repositories.

Tables

If you would like a table to display as you read your text you can submit it either as a .csv (Comma Separated Values) file or written directly in kramdown/markdown, its final format. In general, we prefer the simpler table formats. Please avoid rowspans, for example. If you feel you need a complex visualization, consider submitting an image or hosting the visualization elsewhere and linking to it from a screenshot.

If you would like to submit a more complex table you can do so as a separate PDF. We would then link to the table from within the text.

We do not accept tables in Office format.

Submission Guidelines for Digital Projects

archipelagos accepts mid-stage digital scholarship projects beyond the article or monograph format for single-blind review after our editorial team has had a first round of vetting. A polished version of the review will be offered to the project team or lead as coming from archipelagos and written in the royal “we.” We expect the team to take the review seriously, and make appropriate and feasible changes to the project accordingly.

Throughout the review and publication process, our editorial team will work with you to provide constructive feedback on your project. You remain, of course, responsible for the development and upkeep of your project before and after we showcase it on our platform. If your project is accepted in our digital projects featured section, we will also publish the review exchange between our reviewers and your team. If the review process works for all parties, we offer the opportunity to launch or highlight your project upon publication of the relevant archipelagos issue.

In addition to reviewing projects directly, we support essay-length “project narratives” that describe the process, infrastructure, or new major feature of a digital project. These essays go through the same single-blind method as projects, and will be published alongside featured projects. If you have any questions about which is the right fit for you, feel free to contact us.

We are particularly keen to support projects that make an important scholarly contribution to the study of the Caribbean; that are conscious of the design process and underlying infrastructures of digital technology; that acknowledge the contribution of all members of the team appropriately; and that have taken into account matters of longevity and ephemerality. For a more detailed sense of our criteria and process, please consult the guidelines we have prepared for our reviewers.

Direct Project review occurs in two phases:

  1. Authors submit a Project Statement consisting of a 500-to-700 word description of the project. Reviewers will offer initial feedback within four to six weeks based on the description and an exploration of the project. If the project is still in beta and not available publicly, you must share a link to the development site. We will ensure that the link does not leave our editorial circles.

  2. Authors respond to reviewer feedback in a 1000-to-1200-word narrative and provide a link to a navigable beta site for final review.

  3. The editors will write an introduction to the project and compile the project’s own introduction written exclusively for us, the reviewer comments and the response from the project team or lead for final publication on a dedicated project page.

Project description essays will follow the same process as an article review.
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