Submissions

This journal is not accepting submissions at this time.

Submission Preparation Checklist

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.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
  • If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.

Author Guidelines

Authors must register with the journal prior to submitting work or, if already registered, can simply log in and begin the five-step process.

Digital Literary Studies is interested in a broad range of digital scholarship, and welcomes submissions of:

Long Research Papers

Original scholarly articles and research papers, both with a practical and theoretical focus, of 5,000 – 12,000 words in length. Papers should either approach literary criticism / analysis via computational methods, or offer criticism / theoretical expositions of electronic literature and other relevant topics.

Short Positional Papers

Well-researched and appropriately referenced positional papers will also be considered. Positional papers are typically shorter reflective pieces with a theoretical / critical focus. Positional papers present an opportunity for scholars to share some of their intellectual views with the wider community.

Short Quantitative Articles / Experiments

Shorter 2,000 – 4000 word original articles with a focus on methodologies, experimentation (both successful and failed), development, digital project descriptions and/or reviews, as well as other more technical subject matters, are also eligible for consideration.

Digital Editions, Projects & Tools

Any digital project with a literary focus will be considered for peer-review, whether that be an edition, tool, or otherwise. Contributors should submit a link to their project, accompanied by a detailed outline of the project's design, implementation, rationale, and scope. Where appropriate, any particular intellectual considerations should be discussed in detail. Focus may also be given to well-documented hermeneutical tools, where the tools are treated as a form of interpretation.

Curated Electronic Texts

Collections of curated electronic texts which have been appropriately encoded may be peer-reviewed. Successful collections will be made publicly available and preserved in the Pennsyvlania State University's institutional repository, ScholarSphere.

Reviews

1,000 – 2,000 word reviews of scholarly texts, electronic literature, or any other form of digital project.

Review Process

Where possible, please ensure that your submission is appropriate for blind review. Any author names, or information indicating who the author of an article may be, should be removed. This includes document metadata.

Style guide

Language

Articles may be submitted in either UK or US English, provided that usage remains consistent throughout. Quotations should not be altered to be consistent with the author's style, and should remain as they appear in the original source. Words and phrases in any language other than English should be italicised, unless they are proper names or quotations, or are now part of common usage within the English language.

Citation Style

Citations should follow the Modern Language Association 7th Edition. Articles should not be accompanied by a bibliography, only a list of works cited. A more detailed account of this style should be sought by authors unfamiliar with its use. Notes should be gathered at the end of the document.

Quotations

Use double inverted commas for quotations. Only use single inverted commas where quotation marks are contained within a quotation.

All punctuation should be outside of the quotation marks, unless it forms part of the quotation. For example, in this sentence, "only this part is a quote, and therefore the punctuation goes outside the inverted commas". "But in this sentence, the punctuation forms part of the quotation, so remains inside the inverted commas."

Quotations that exceed three lines in length should be broken off from the main body of text, with a line skipped before and after the block, with the left-hand side appropriately indented.

Abbreviations & Acronyms

Only place a full stop / period (.) at the end of abbreviations when the final letter of the abbreviation is not the last letter of the abbreviated word.

Examples:
Doctor - Dr
Saint - St
Professor - Prof.
Volume - Vol.

Acronyms should not be punctuated: use US, not U.S., unless you are referring to an academic qualification: Ph.D., M.A., M.Sc.

Miscellaneous

Write zero to nine as words, and 10 upwards as numeric digits.

Any dashes should appear as an en dash (–), and should not be substituted/confused with hyphens.

Any monetary values should be indicated using a currency symbol.

Dates should be represented in the form: November 11th, 2014; November 2014. Approximate dates should use c.2014.

Only proper nouns should be capitalized.

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Digital Literary Studies is freely published at no cost to its contributors.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party besides the Journal and the Publisher.