Submission guidelines for <title level="j">The Digital Medievalist

About the Digital Medievalist

Digital Medievalist DM is a peer-reviewed, on-line scholarly journal. DM publishes work of original research and scholarship, theoretical articles on digital topics, notes on technological topics (markup and stylesheets, tools and software, etc.), commentary pieces discussing developments in the field, bibliographic and review articles, tutorials, and project reports. The journal also commissions reviews of books and major electronic sites and projects. All contributions are reviewed before publication by authorities in humanities computing.

Submissions to DM should concern topics likely to be of interest to medievalists working with digital media, though they need not be exclusively medieval in focus. They should be of a length appropriate to the subject under discussion. In most cases, this means between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Reviews should be approximately 1,000 words for single works; between 2,000 and 5,000 for review articles or reviews of more than one work.

DM currently is published twice a year: spring, and fall. The inaugural issue appeared in spring 2005. Beginning in 2006, the spring issue will feature conference papers from the previous summer alongside other research and reviews.

Review process

Readers

DM publishes commissioned and peer-reviewed contributions. Submission procedures for commissioned articles are arranged directly with the authors. Peer-reviewed contributions are reviewed by at least two readers: one member of the editorial board and one reader chosen for his or her expertise in the article's subject area. Readers can recommend acceptance, rejection, or revision of the submission. Final publication decision is made by the reviewing editor in consultation with the editorial board.

Accepting editors and recommending readers are identified in a colophon on all articles accepted for publication in DM. Rejecting readers remain anonymous unless they expressly waive their anonymity.

Time to decision and publication

The editors of DM make every effort to review and, where warranted, publish articles in a timely fashion. Our goal is to reach a publication decision within two months of submission, and to publish accepted articles within three to nine months. Although we will make every effort to follow these guidelines, circumstances beyond our control may result in us processing an article more quickly or more slowly than anticipated. We will endeavour to keep contributors informed of any extraordinary delays. Contributors are encouraged to contact the editors in case of doubt.

DM will consider submissions at any time. Work intended for publication in a given issue must be submitted no less than three months before the scheduled publication. For the spring issue, this means no later than December 31st. For the fall issue, the deadline is August 31st.

Simultaneous submissions

DM does not review work that is under consideration elsewhere. Our policy is to reject simultaneous submissions and inform editors of the other publications(s) in question.

Submission procedures

DM accepts electronic submissions only. Submissions should be e-mailed as attachments to the editorial board, digitalmedievalist@uleth.ca. Please provide a subject line indicating that you are making a submission.

The University of Lethbridge mail server rejects files with the extension .zip. If you are sending a zip file, you are advised to change the extension name—e.g. to .zippy.

Initial submissions should be in a widely recognised display format, e.g. PDF, XHMTL, OpenOffice/Word Perfect/Word, or XML with appropriate stylesheets. Upon acceptance, articles will be converted to TEI XML (currently P4). The editors are open to highly original work in other (preferably non-propriety) formats. Copy is formatted for display using the XHTML 1.0 Strict dtd.

If your work is accepted for publication, it will be copy-edited and converted to TEI XML. Copy-edited text will be sent with queries for one or more rounds of approval. Final copy will be posted to a secure web-site for proof-approval. In keeping with the recommendations of The Chicago manual of style 2003, submissions will not be corrected or revised after final publication, although the editors may consider the publication of errata in egregious cases.

Article structure

Submissions to DM should contain the following elements in the indicated order (starred elements are required):

*Title *Author name(s), home institution or city *Abstract (no more than 300 words) *Keywords (five or six one or two word phrases to describe the subject of your contribution) Acknowledgements *Main body of article Appendices List of works cited

Title

Articles

Your essay should begin with a descriptive title. We prefer you to err on the side of clarity and explicitness rather than cuteness: "A method for indicating manuscript damage in TEI P5 XML" is preferable to "Out, damned spot!". There is nothing wrong with "Out, damned spot! A method for indicating manuscript damage in TEI P5 XML".

Reviews

Reviews should use the bibliographic details of the work or works under consideration as their title.

Author name(s), home institution or city

Authors should be listed by name and institution (e.g. university, college, company, or agency) or city. More specific attributions of responsibility are permissible (e.g. "with a bibliographic appendix by..."). To avoid spam, we do not include e-mail addresses on articles unless specifically requested. Institutional affiliations allow readers to find you via Internet search engines.

Examples

Arianna Ciula, King's College London

Guyda Armstrong, University of Cardiff. Vika Zafrin, Brown University

Lisa Simpson, West Springfield. With the assistance of Homer Simpson, Springfield Nuclear Power Plant Inc.

Abstract

You should include a brief abstract of no more than 300 words. This abstract is an important navigation aid, especially for users with small screens, slow machines, or accessibility devices. It will also be distributed independently for publicity purposes (e.g. via our RSS server). Readers should be able to decide on the basis of your abstract whether your article is likely to be of relevance to them.

Keywords

Please supply a list of five or six words or short phrases that describe the subject matter of your contribution. These will be used as search terms by readers.

Acknowledgements

A short paragraph of acknowledgements for funding or other assistance (if desired) may be placed immediately before the main body of your essay. In the final copy this will be placed at the end of your essay, before the endnotes. Acknowledgements can also be added during the production process.

Main body

Headers

The main body of your article should include headers and sub-headers where appropriate. These will be used to generate a table of contents. Contributors should not supply a table of contents. This will be generated automatically.

Paragraphs

DM uses paragraph numbers to aid in citation. These will be generated automatically.

Illustrations, figures, and objects

DM encourages authors to use illustrations, figures, and other non-textual material (e.g. sound or video clips) in their work. The preferred image format is PNG, though other formats (e.g. TIFF, JPEG, SVG) are acceptable. Images embedded in word processor documents will need to be submitted as separate files upon acceptance. Unless otherwise arranged, all images will be converted to PNG and reduced to a maximum width of 510 pixels (at 72 dpi) for publication. Authors should include a descriptive caption for each figure.

Endnotes

Notes should be kept to a minimum and should be used solely to comment or expand upon the main text of the article. Since DM uses an in-line documentation style (see below), endnotes should not be used for simple citation of sources.

Acceptable endnotes

1 The MEP website has been inaccessible due to renovations since December 7, 2004.

2 Indeed, e-books and digital newspapers have in many areas, despite the expenditure of vast sums (far larger than has been spent on digital scholarly editions!), failed to impact on print publication. For doubts about the viability of e-books see Peter Meirs (Meirs [n.d.]). Some remarkable statistics on the failure of digital newspapers are given by Vin Crosbie (Crosbie 2004a). For example, the Washington Post has an audited print circulation of 732,904. Its digital circulation is 424. In a followup, Crosbie pointed out that there are in fact many successful instances of digital publishing in other categories of business publication—just not digital newspapers (Crosbie 2004b).

2 See the landmark first Colloque International de Paliographie (Bischoff et al. 1954). Actually, the matter of nomenclature has not always been considered a priority and it has been approached from different and often irreconcilable perspectives and attitudes. See, for instance, the debate mentioned by Gumbert 1976 between an historical and a Cartesian—meaning abstract—approach.

Unacceptable endnotes

1 Bischoff et al. 1954

2 Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval literary theory and criticism c.1100-c.1375: the commentary tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 37-38.

Appendices

Appendices may be used for material that is not part of the main argument but is unsuitable for inclusion in an endnote. Possible topics include extended bibliographic, terminological, or technical digressions, code samples, or detailed discussion of examples from the main body. While appendices may be tangential to the main argument, they should not be unrelated or unnecessarily digressive.

Works cited

Most contributions should have a list of works cited. DM uses the Chicago B (scientific) author-date system. Detailed instructions can be found below (Documentation).

Style, language, and spelling

Language and spelling

The language of publication in DM is English. We currently accept articles in any standard English spelling (American, British, Canadian, Australian, etc.). Whichever spelling system you choose should be used consistently. American spelling is checked against the American Heritage dictionary; British spelling against the Oxford Concise; and Canadian against the Oxford dictionary of Canadian English.

Style

All articles published in DM must be well-written. Well written in this case does not mean Kunstprosa. Our preferred style is clear, well-organised, well-argued, and concise. Contributors whose native language is not English are advised to have their contributions read by a native speaker before submission. All contributions are copy-edited for style and content.

Treatment of foreign words and phrases

Quotations from texts in languages other than English are acceptable. In most cases, translations into modern English should be included. In the case of shorter quotations, these should be included in the main text of the article, surround by quotations marks. Longer foreign-language quotations should be accompanied by a modern English translation. If the original passage is included in the main body of the text, this translation should appear as a footnote. If the translation is found in the main body of the article, the original text may be included in a footnote at the contributor's discretion. Whichever approach is taken should be followed consistently. Foreign words and phrases commonly used in English or easily understood from context may be left untranslated.

Examples

Untranslated words and phrases

...the massive project that eventually published some 20,000 pages of Wittgenstein's Nachlaß in digital facsimile and transcripts..

Smaller quotations and phrases

...King Alfred first translated Boethius literally into prose and then geworhte hi eft to leoðe, swa swa heo nu gedon is, reworked it for verse, just as it is done here, that is, in a prose-and-verse manuscript.

Longer foreign language passages

The following example, places the translated text in the main body of the article, and the original text in the associated footnote; contributors may also place the translation in the footnote and the original text in the main body.

This involves a formal and stylistic comparison—as Supino Martini stresses in her statements about the palaeographical method—between what has reached us with a close paternity (or date) and what is supposed to be possibly brought back to the same paternity (or date). 1

1 confronto formale e stilistico fra quanto ci è giunto con paternità (o data) vicina e quanto si presume possa essere ricondotto alla stessa paternità (o data) (Supino Martini 1995, 18).

Capitalisation

DM uses a down (or sentence case) style (see The Chicago manual of style 2003, esp. §§ 8.2-8.3). In English language text, capital letters are found on proper nouns and the first word of sentences, titles, and headers. All other words are lower case. The only exceptions are names of organisations or institutions, journals, or publication series. These are capitalised as in the original.

Examples

Headers

Towards the electronic Esposizioni: the challenges of the online commentary

Titles of organisations, institutions, journals, or series

The society has collaborated with several initiatives to put substantial segments of the EETS into electronic form—as part, for example, of the Middle English Compendium MEC .

Book/article titles

Foys, Martin, ed. 2003. The Bayeux tapestry digital edition. Leicester: Scholarly Digital Editions.

Other languages are capitalised according to the relevant standard. In case of doubt, consult The Chicago manual of style 2003, chapter 10.

Punctuation

DM uses the British or alternative style of punctuation with quotations. Final punctuation not found in the original quotation should be placed outside quotation marks. See The Chicago manual of style 2003, § 6.10.

DM uses the serial or Oxford comma before the final conjunction in lists of three or more items: e.g. this, that, and the other thing.

Documentation

DM uses the Chicago B documentation style. This is an in-line, author-year system. Full details can be found in The Chicago manual of style 2003, chapters 16 and 17 (esp. §§ 16.4, 16.5, 16.8-18, 16.90-120, and the examples in chapter 17).

General points

Author names

Please give the full names of the first three authors (if more than three authors are credited, the third author name is followed by et al.). The first author name is inverted; subsequent names are in the normal order (first name followed by initials followed by last name). Where more than one author is listed, the first author is followed by a comma.

Robinson, Peter, and Kevin Taylor. 1998. Publishing an electronic textual edition: the case of <title level="m">The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM. Computers and the Humanities 32: 271-84.

Author names should be given as they are in the work in question. If the same author uses different forms of the same name in different publications (e.g. Kevin Kiernan / Kevin S. Kiernan), authors are asked to normalise entries to the fullest form. Authors who use significantly different first or family names in different works (e.g Alison Jones, later Alison Gyger; Olaf S. Arngart, alternatively O. S. Anderson) should not be grouped together. Use the name found on the work being cited. Cross references can be used to make the connection explicit, if desired; in such cases please ensure all such examples are cross referenced:

Gyger, Alison. 1969. The Old English <title level="m">Soul and Body as an example of oral transmission. Medium Ævum 38 (1969): 239-44.

───. See also Jones, Alison.

Jones, Alison. 1966. <title level="m">Daniel and Azarias as evidence for the oral formula. Medium Ævum 35: 95-102.

───. See also Gyger, Alison.

Anderson, O. S. 1941. Old English material in the Leningrad manuscript of Bede's ecclesiastical history. Skrifter utgivna av Kungl. humanistiska vetenskapssamfundet i Lund/Acta reg. societatis humaniorum litterarum Lundensis, 31. Lund: Gleerup.

Arngart, O. S. 1952. The Leningrad Bede: an eighth century manuscript of the Venerable Bede's <title level="m">Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in the Public Library, Leningrad. Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, 2. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger.

Titles

All English and Latin (and most foreign language) titles should be given in sentence case (see The Chicago manual of style 2003, §§ 17.51 and 17.64). Titles of books, journals, and free-standing texts of any length (e.g. Beowulf [3182 lines]; Cædmon's Hymn [9 lines]) should be italicised. Series titles are roman.

Journal articles

In text

(Needham 1999, 458)

Works cited list

Needham, Paul. 1999. Counting incunables: the IISTC CD-ROM. Huntington Library Quarterly 61: 457-529.

Notes:

Journal names: Please spell out all journal names except international and interdisciplinary journals known solely by their initials (e.g. PMLA vs. Notes and Queries). Issue numbers: Issue numbers are not required. If they are used, they are separated from the volume number by a period (e.g. 61.3).

Monographs

In text

(Derolez 2003, i; Minnis 1991)

Works cited list

Derolez, Albert. 2003. The palaeography of Gothic manuscript books from the twelfth to the early sixteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Minnis, Alistair J. 1991. Medieval literary theory and criticism c.1100-c.1375: the commentary tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon.

Notes:

Multiple publishers/places of publication: Only one publisher and place of publication need be listed in citing works published in more than one city or by more than one press. Choose the first or most relevant place of publication and publisher (i.e. either the location of the head office or the location nearest you). A notable exception is the University of California Press, which should be cited thus: Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. Place of publication: DM prefers anglicised city names, except where the original city name is commonly cited in the original language. E.g. we would prefer Belgrade to Beograd in the works cited list. Smaller cities or cities with easily confused names may be identified by province, state, or country. For provinces and states, please use the official post office abbreviations (e.g. AB, not Alta. or Alberta; CT, not Conn. or Connecticut). Lists can be found in The Chicago manual of style 2003, §§ 15.29-30. DM uses Cambridge MA for the city in Massachusetts, and Cambridge for the city in England. The US capital is Washington DC. Publishers: Publishers should be recorded using a (slightly abbreviated) form of the name on the title or copyright page. Omit initial the, final indications of corporate status (Inc., Co., GmbH), and first names and initials (e.g. Wiley, not John Wiley and Son). Press is retained when it is an essential part of the publisher's name and omitted when it is not (e.g. New Press, Oxford University Press, Clarendon). University should be spelled out. Always spell out ampersands. Do not update publisher's names or locations to reflect subsequent mergers, reorganisations, or relocations. Citations of works published more than a century ago may omit the publisher's name. Dates. Please use the date given on the title or copyright page. Reprinted works generally should be cited by their original date of copyright/publication, not the date of their reissue or renewal of copyright; subsequent editions, on the other hand, should be cited by the publication/copyright date of the version used. See The Chicago manual of style 2003, § 7.115, for a discussion. If the original date of publication is of special interest (e.g. for historical reasons, or to determine priority in the development of an idea), it may be included in the citation, separated from the date of the edition cited by a slash (e.g. Ker 1957/1990).

Chapters in books

In text

(Ahern 1997, 215-6)

Works cited list

Critical editions

Critical editions are usually cited in DM by the name of the editor rather than the original author. In cases where the name of the author is more important (e.g. in epigraphs), the citation may be by author, although the form (Geoffrey Chaucer [McGillivray 1997]) may also be used.

In text

(McGillivray 1997)

Works cited list

McGillivray, Murray, ed. 1997. Geoffrey Chaucer's Book of the duchess: a hypertext edition. CD-ROM. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

Editions of historical texts with a known author often include the name of the author in the title (as above). If this information is not included, but is considered significant by the contributor, it may be placed after the title information.

In text

(Kane and Donaldson 1988)

Works cited list

Kane, George, and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., 1988. <title level="m">Piers Plowman: the B version, Will's visions of Piers Plowman, Do Well, Do Better and Do Best: an edition in the form of Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, corrected and restored from the known evidence, with variant readings. By William Langland. Rev. ed. London: Athlone Press.

Electronic resources

Internet resources

DM distinguishes between two main types of Internet citations:

bibliographic resources addresses of record

Bibliographic citations involve online material that is discussed or being cited as evidence to support an argument. Such references are documented and cited like any other bibliographic item: they are listed in the works cited section and cited by author and year whenever possible in the main text.

Addresses of record include corporate or project home pages whose content is being cited primarily to supply an address rather than support an argument. Contributors may cite these by URL in the main text of the article. DM style calls for all URLs to be mentioned explicitly: e.g. Digital Medievalist (), not Digital Medievalist.

There are no hard and fast rules for distinguishing between these two uses. As a rule of thumb, citations of top-level domains (e.g. ) are more likely to be addresses of record than are citations of more specific documents (e.g. ). Contributors are asked to use their judgement.

Citations of well-documented Internet resources usually can be built following the model of a print analogue: articles in on-line journals should be cited using the print journal model; on-line books should be cited using the print book model; e-mail correspondence should be cited using the model for manuscript letters. Some examples follow and many more can be found in The Chicago manual of style 2003 (e.g. electronic books: §§ 17.47, 17.142-47; electronic journals: §§ 17.180-81). The citation of more informally published resources may require more ingenuity. Examples may be found in The Chicago manual of style 2003, esp. §§ 17.234-237.

In text

(Crosbie 2004a; Crosbie 2004b; Duggan 1994/2003).

Works cited list

Crosbie, Vin. 2004a. Woeful circulations for digital editions. Digital Deliverance. August 12. .

───. 2004b. Woeful circulation for just retailed digital edition of newspapers. Digital Deliverance. August 19. .

Duggan, Hoyt N. 1994/2003. 1994 Prospectus: archive goals. The <title level="m">Piers Plowman electronic archive. .

Other electronic resources

Electronic resources published on discrete media (e.g. CD-ROM, DVD, floppy-discs) or by download generally pose fewer bibliographic problems. Whenever possible, they should be treated like the closest print-equivalent. The main difference is that all non-print works should have the storage or delivery medium indicated expressly: e.g. CD-ROM, 2 3.5 inch floppy discs.

In text

(Kiernan 2003).

Works cited list

Kiernan, Kevin, ed. 2003. The Electronic Beowulf. London, British Library. CD-ROM. Second edition.

Ahern, John. 1997. Singing the book: orality in the reception of Dante's <title level="m">Comedy. In Dante: contemporary perspectives, ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci, 214-39. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bischoff, B., G. I. Lieftinck, and G. Battelli, 1954. Nomenclatures des écritures livresques du IXe au XVIe siècles. Paris. The Chicago manual of style. 2003. 15th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crosbie, Vin. 2004a. Woeful circulations for digital editions. Digital Deliverance. August 12. . ───. 2004b. Woeful circulation for just retailed digital edition of newspapers. Digital Deliverance. August 19. . Derolez, Albert. 2003. The palaeography of Gothic manuscript books from the twelfth to the early sixteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duggan, Hoyt N. 1994/2003. 1994 Prospectus: archive goals. The <title level="m">Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. . Gumbert, J. P. 1976. A proposal for a Cartesian nomenclature. In Essays presented to G.I. Lieftinck, IV: miniatures, scripts, collections (Litterae Textuales), ed. J.P. Gumbert and M.J.M. De Haan, 45-52. Amsterdam: A.L. Van Gendt. Kane, George, and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., 1988. <title level="m">Piers Plowman: the B version, Will's visions of Piers Plowman, Do Well, Do Better and Do Best: an edition in the form of Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, corrected and restored from the known evidence, with variant readings. By William Langland. Rev. ed. London: Athlone Press. Kiernan, Kevin, ed. 2003. The Electronic Beowulf. London, British Library. CD-ROM. Second edition. Meirs, Peter. [n.d.] Progress, yes, where we need to be - No. FIPP: Magazine World. . Originally published in Digital Magazine News (. McGillivray, Murray, ed. 1997. Geoffrey Chaucer's Book of the duchess: a hypertext edition. CD-ROM. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Minnis, Alistair J. 1991. Medieval literary theory and criticism c.1100-c.1375: the commentary tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Needham, Paul. 1999. Counting incunables: the IISTC CD-ROM. Huntington Library Quarterly 61: 457-529. Supino Martini, Paola. 1995. Sul metodo paleografico: formulazione di problemi per una discussione. Scrittura e Civiltà 19: 5-29.