DHQ Submission Guidelines

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Submitting an Article
Formats of Submission and Publication
Review and Publication Process

Submitting an Article

DHQ invites submissions at rolling three-month intervals with deadlines on January 15, April 15, July 15, and October 15. In summer 2018, we are holding a brief moratorium on submissions so that we can migrate to the new version of our submission management system; we will resume reviewing with the October 15, 2018 deadline. Submissions received prior to July 3 will be reviewed; any submissions received after that point will be reviewed at the October deadline.

DHQ uses the Open Journal System to manage the logistics of submission and review. To submit an article to DHQ, please visit our submission page. If this is your first DHQ submission under OJS, you will need to create an account; if you already have an account, just sign in and follow the instructions.

DHQ welcomes submissions in a variety of formats. The guidelines below spell out our expectations and requirements. However, we are also interested in ongoing experimentation with different modes of journal authoring and publishing. We encourage authors to help us experiment. If you have a good idea that doesn't fit into our current guidelines, let us know! We'll be happy to discuss it.

DHQ accepts submissions for the following categories:

Articles: Article-length pieces describing original research.
Issues in Digital Humanities: Substantive, provocative opinion-driven essays of any length.
Reviews: Reviews of other publications (digital or print), tools, artworks, conferences, and other relevant material.
Case Studies: Detailed analyses of specific projects that contextualize the project within the DH field, and demonstrate its significance for other practitioners

A submission in any category must meet the following basic standards for DHQ publication:

It must fall within the content domain of the journal (very broadly, digital humanities and related fields).
It must be addressed to an appropriate audience. The audience of DHQ is of course the digital humanities community, but it also extends more broadly to related domains and to the interested non-specialist: for instance, humanities faculty, digital artists, museum curators, archivists, and the like. DHQ articles should be clear without being elementary; they should not rely on insider knowledge, and they should situate their argument within a broader context of research.
It must have an argument, and it should represent an original contribution to the research and practice of the digital humanities field, or should offer an original analysis, critique, or viewpoint on some aspect thereof.
It must be well written, and must present its argument clearly and interestingly. (However, we can help the author improve the writing and argumentation, so a lack in this area is not necessarily a disqualification.)

Submission of a manuscript will be held to imply that it contains unpublished original material and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

Submissions may be of any length.

Formats of Submission and Publication

DHQ is an entirely digital journal, published in XML. We accept submissions in the following formats:

XML files encoded in the DHQ markup language; a schema and authoring template are available.
XML files encoded in TEI
RTF, OpenOffice (and its variants), or MS Word

Submissions may also include supplementary files including images, audio, video, and accompanying data sets. In the initial submission, for ease of reviewing, figures should be embedded in the text. For the final version (if the article is accepted), all supplementary materials should be submitted as separate files (rather than being embedded in the submission) and may be in the following formats:

Image file formats: PNG, JPG, GIF, PDF and SVG
Audio file formats: MP3
Video file formats: Please contact the journal for details
Data sets: plain text, CSV, tab-delimited data, or XML
Executable code: Please contact the journal for details

To ensure that we can maintain long-term access to the journal's content, materials will be published and stored wherever possible in XML and standards-based multimedia formats. For purposes of managing the journal in the long term, we distinguish between two types of publication:

Standard DHQ publication

These are pieces that can be fully represented using DHQ’s regular XML markup, which also supports links to image files, audio and video, and downloadable data files and appendices. DHQ takes full responsibility for the future maintenance of these submissions and guarantees their functionality and accessibility for the life of the journal.

Author-designed publication

These are pieces which cannot be represented using DHQ’s regular XML markup. These might include submissions that include program code or specialized formatting or behaviors. DHQ handles submissions of this kind so as to provide a durable article “stub” in DHQ’s normal XML format, with links to more specialized materials. Individual components of the submission (images, program code, CSS, etc.) must follow DHQ’s standard directory structure, and the author should provide a readme file documenting the design; please contact us for specific details. For author-designed publications, DHQ will make a good-faith effort to maintain the functionality of the publication over the long term, and will guarantee that the data will remain available for download for the life of the journal, but we cannot guarantee functionality of author-designed components. The data formats we support for author-designed publication are XML, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XSLT, and the image and audiovisual file formats named above. Please contact us if you are planning a submission of this kind so that we can discuss it with you.

Review and publication process

Review and revision

All materials submitted for each deadline are peer reviewed. Authors will be notified of one of the following decisions:

Accept pending revisions: The submission is accepted for publication, with minor revisions based on the reviewers' feedback.
Revise and resubmit. The submission has potential, but needs revision based on the reviewers’ feedback. Resubmissions will be sent out for a fresh review, and will, in most cases, be reviewed by one of the original reviewers. If necessary, further revisions may be requested until the article is suitable for publication.
Decline: The submission is declined as unsuitable for the journal.

The editors of DHQ are committed to working with authors to bring out the best potential in their work, and can provide mentors for junior scholars or those new to the field.

Production

Following revision, all materials accepted for publication will be copyedited for conformance with DHQ style and for consistency, and then encoded in DHQ’s TEI-based XML markup if they are not already in that format. Finally, a proof version of each piece will be posted internally for the author's review. This is largely to ensure that the encoding process has not altered any essential features of the piece. The author will typically have a week to check the piece and confirm its accuracy. Any final changes may be made at this time.

Publication

All materials are published at the DHQ site in preview form as soon as they are given final approval. At roughly quarterly intervals, a new issue is announced. Materials from previous years will become part of the DHQ archive (available for reading and searching) and will also be archived permanently in the digital repository at Northeastern University.