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Start SubmissionSubmissions 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.
There are no set article lengths, although we prefer as a rule to publish articles in the range between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Authors are encouraged to be as concise as their subject matter and approach allows.
Submissions normally should be structured as follows:
Please ensure that your submission has a title that adequately describes its content. This is important for discovery by others using standard search engines.
Please provide an abstract summarising the main arguments and conclusions: a good abstract provides the reader with a complete overview of the article.
Please provide five or six keywords or phrases that describe the subject matter of your submission.
The body of the submission should be structured in a logical and easy-to-follow manner. Subheadings should be used to divide the article into appropriate sections. Ensure that your subheadings are descriptive of the content in that section.
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).
Subheadings may be numbered or not. DSCN does not have a preferred number style for headings.
If your article has acknowledgements, please place these in a clearly-labelled section after the main body and before the references.
Competing and conflicting interests must be declared. 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.
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 can be found here: http://bit.ly/1rBoe0S.
Articles written by more than one author must describe the contributions of each author. We require the CASRAI CRediT contributor role typology. This typology 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:
Details of what these terms mean can be found at http://dictionary.casrai.org/Contributor_Roles.
All references cited within the submission must be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style 16th 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). The journal reserves the right to charge a fee to authors whose references require significant copy-editing, formatting, and/or research during production.
The languages of submission and publication in Digital studies/Le champ numérique are English or French. For the possibility of publishing in other languages, please contact the editors. A French or English translation is usually required regardless of publication in other languages. All abstracts and keywords are published in French and English.
Please use a common font (e.g. Arial, Times New Roman, etc.) with a minimum size of 12 pt.
Because this font may change during production, you should not rely on distinctions in font to make substantive arguments. You should also avoid using custom or proprietary fonts and/or private-use Unicode characters. If your submission requires the use of custom fonts or private-use Unicode characters, please contact the editors.
Authors should not attempt to use fonts to produce type facsimiles mimicking the appearance of other documents (e.g. relative character size, font distinctions, etc.). If the appearance of another document is important for your argument, consider including a photographic facsimile.
In addition to the standard font-weight and face, authors may use italics, bold, and monospace to mark common distinctions in their text (e.g. foreign words, emphasis). Authors should avoid underline and other distinctive text forms. Italics and bold should be used sparingly for emphasis. Monospace should be used only for code.
For detailed matters of style (punctuation, capitalisation, etc.), please consult the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. The following guidelines address frequently asked questions.
Authors should use a consistent spelling system throughout their article. Canadian spelling is preferred but not required. In French this means as per Quebec usage. In English this means U.K./Commonwealth, except, primarily, for automotive terms, which are spelled as in American. When referring to proper nouns, technical terms and institutional titles, the official, original spelling must be used regardless of the spelling system used in the main text. I.e.:
Quotation marks are used to enclose:
Quotation marks are not used for:
When you are using quotation marks, please follow Chicago style (see esp. §6.10). In English, this means:
Quotation marks should be used the same way in all circumstances—for quotations, translations and glosses, “scare quotes,” etc. Do not use single quotation marks in some cases and double quotation marks in others. Italics should not be used to set-off quotations unless they are used in the original text.
Quotations that are three lines in length or longer should be in block quotation format. This means that their left margin should be indented from the left margin of the main body (1 cm or the equivalent of one tab stop is usually sufficient). Do not italicise block quotations unless they are italicised in your source.
Quotations of less than three lines should be set off by quotation marks.
As a rule, DSCN does not allow URLs in the main text of articles. Web resources that are being cited in an article should be treated as citations, placed in the Works-Cited list and referred to in the main body by Author-Year as with any other citation. We do this to ensure that web resources are correctly harvested with other references.
Whenever code is quoted, it should be in monotype. The emphasis in quoting code should be on clarity: use block quotation style for complex examples or you are quoting more than a line or two of code.
You should use code style whenever you are quoting information inputted to, outputted from, or used by a computer processor. The following are all examples of code:
index.html)~/home/user/Documents/)<h1>The title</h1>)site:.edu, "...prefixed by https:// rather than http://)Exceptions include Graphical User Interface (GUI) prompts (e.g. “Do you want to delete this text?”), the text of GUI buttons (e.g. “Save”) and menu paths (i.e. File > Templates > Save As Templates). Prompts and Button Texts should be placed in quotation marks. Menu paths should be reproduced in the default text with individual steps being indicated with a greater than sign.
If a user must enter text into a GUI prompt, this should be treated as code.
With abbreviations, the crucial goal is to ensure that the reader – particularly one who may not be fully familiar with the topic or context being addressed – is able to follow along. The normal rule is to spell out acronyms on first use, indicating the acronym in parentheses immediately thereafter. Use the acronym for all subsequent references.
A number of abbreviations are so common that they do not require the full text on the first instance (e.g. USA, UK, HTTP).
Abbreviations should usually be in capital letters without full stops.
Common examples from Latin origin do not follow this rule and should be lowercase and can include full stops.
Avoid footnotes/endnotes: In an online format, notes are extremely disruptive and should be avoided whenever possible. Authors will be asked to eliminate footnotes/endnotes during the copy-editing process.
Footnotes or endnotes containing bibliographic references only (e.g. “(Frye 1969)” or “See Frye 1969”) will not be accepted.
Symbols are permitted within the main text and datasets as long as they are commonly in use or have explanatory definition on their first usage.
Hyphens should not be used in your submission to divide words at the end of a line in your manuscript. Hyphenation, when required, will be introduced by the typesetter.
Hyphens should be used to separate compound adjectives. Otherwise, consult a style guide for preferred practice.
Please indicate em dashes using a double hyphen (--) or the em-dash character. There is no space between an em-dash and the preceding or following words.
En dashes can be used to replace ‘to’ when indicating a range. No space should surround the dash.
Symbols following a figure to denote a unit of measurement must be taken from the latest SI brochure. See http://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf for the full brochure.
Figures, including graphs and diagrams, must be professionally and clearly presented. If a figure is not easy to understand or does not appear to be of a suitable quality, the editor may ask to re-render or omit it. Figures should be in colour where possible and at a resolution of at least 300 dpi. Each file should not be more than 20MB. Standard formats accepted are: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS. For line drawings, please provide the original vector file (e.g. .ai, or .eps). All figures must be uploaded as supplementary files in OJS.
Table should be made using the table function of your wordprocessor (rather than as images or using tabs). Please avoid rotated text whenever possible. Tables should be collected at the end of the document, after works cited.
All figures and tables must be referred to in the main body of your article, in consecutive order using Arabic numerals (e.g "In Figure 2, we see" "as shown in Table 3"). The typesetter will position tables and figures at the nearest instertion point to the reference.
Do not use relative position markers such as "above," "below," "next," or "preceding." If for some reason a table or figure must appear before or after a specific piece of text, please indicate this with a comment in the text.
Each figure and table must have an accompanying descriptive caption/title (e.g. "Figure 1: 1685 map of London"). This should clearly and concisely summarise its content and/or purpose. Put table captions below tables at the end of your manuscript. Provide a list of figure captions after any tables.
All references cited within the submission must be formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style 16th 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). The journal reserves the right to charge a fee to authors whose references require significant copy-editing, formatting, and/or research during production.
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
This journal 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.
Fee waivers do not apply at the Open Library of Humanities because our funding model does not rely on author charges.