for reviewers
At archipelagos we are working to build a community of reviewers and contributors so to sustain and enrich our collective Caribbeanist scholarship. If you would like to join our team of reviewers—to help us review articles and digital projects—please contact us at archipelagosjournal@gmail.com.
Contents
Review Guidelines for Digital Projects
archipelagos accepts mid-stage digital scholarship projects beyond the article or monograph format for single-blind review. Our review process is crafted in accordance with the DHCommons model, with some additions and revisions. Once peer review is completed, projects are “launched” via a dedicated page on the archipelagos platform. This landing page features a brief description of and link to the project, along with excerpts of audio, visual, and other multimedia elements. This page also provides a link to (a curated version of) the dialogue between site authors and peer reviewers. Click for an example.
Project review occurs in two phases:
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Authors submit a Project statement of 300 to 500 words. Reviewers will offer initial feedback within four to six weeks.
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Authors respond to reviewer feedback in a 1000-to-1200-word narrative and provide a link to a navigable beta site for final review.
The Editors synthesize reviewer comments and the response from the author for final publication on a dedicated project page.
Our review guidelines are separated into four categories: Contribution, Credit, Design, and Preservation.
Contribution
We ask reviewers to carefully weigh the de facto or possible intellectual contribution of the project. Reviewers should consider the nature of that contribution appropriate to the current stage of the project’s development and consider early signs of process-derived knowledge; the project’s relationship to existing literature/projects; and/or early conversations in the literature about the project (where appropriate).
- Will the project frame new conversations in the relevant subject area?
- Are the methods used in the project appropriate to the research questions it poses?
- Do the project’s methods contribute to digital scholarship in general, and if so, how?
Credit
We ask reviewers to be conscious of the labor that went into the making of a digital project. Digital projects generally depend on more distributed collaboration than monographs or articles. archipelagos encourages the crediting of work where credit is due and the acknowledgment of the scholarly and interpretative work involved in data curation, design, and the engineering of digital projects. Reviewers should ask the following questions of a project:
- Does the project credit its contributors openly and fairly?
- Are the labor conditions under which the project was produced made evident?
- Does the work cite its (digital scholarship) precedents and data sources appropriately?
Design
Although design constitutes a separate category of review, we ask reviewers to understand design in terms of its relationship to the purported intellectual contribution of a given project. For archipelagos, design includes back-end architecture, workflow, and front-end interface design. We ask reviewers to consider the overall temporal and technical structure of a project and how this structure relates to the goals of the project. A reviewer may ask questions like
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How do effort and resources used in the project match its import?
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How do the graphic and UX design elements of the front end contribute to the goals of the intellectual contribution? (When considering the public-facing design, reviewers should not place undue weight on “ease of use” or “glossy design” but rather consider whether the project’s features fit the intellectual mission of the project and the resources the project’s team had available to them.)
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How does the back-end architecture hinder or move forward the contribution of the project and perhaps link it to existing digital scholarship projects?
Preservation
When considering the life cycle of a digital scholarship project, reviewers should not to consider preservation in terms of indefinite periods of time. We encourage authors to be realistic about the plausible rate of decay of their projects and to have plans in place to manage the obsolescence of the technologies they use. We welcome projects with a minimum of two years post-beta support. We encourage our reviewers, therefore, to look for signs that the project team has considered the project’s future. Possible questions are
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What standards have been used and why?
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How robust is the documentation on the project? Could the project be decomposed and recomposed based on this documentation?
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How is the project managing its rate of decay?
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Is the level of complexity of the project appropriate for its sociotechnical or institutional context?
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How conscious is the project team regarding the life cycle of the project?
Review of Articles: A Brief Note
Our reviewers are expected to maintain the highest academic standards in the review of scholarly articles for publication in archipelagos. Since many of our articles are media-rich—linking prose arguments rhetorically to visuals—we ask our reviewers also to provide feedback on the figures, images, and interactives used in articles.
Copy Editor Guidelines
- Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation:
- Correct grammatical errors, typos, and misspellings.
- Ensure proper punctuation is used throughout the text to improve clarity and flow.
- Ensure all spellings correspond to United States English.
- Consistency:
- Ensure consistency in formatting, capitalization, numerals, and abbreviations.
- Follow the Chicago Manual of Style to maintain uniformity across the text.
- Ensure use of normal quotation marks. Avoid the use of “smart quotes.”
- Fact-Checking (Basic):
- Verify factual accuracy, such as names, dates, and places. Though copy editors don’t usually conduct in-depth research, they often catch glaring factual errors.
- Clarity and Readability:
- Refine sentences for clarity, ensuring that ideas are presented logically and are easy to understand.
- Simplify overly complex or ambiguous sentences, making the content accessible to the intended audience.
- Style and Tone:
- Maintain or enhance the appropriate tone for an academic audience.
- Ensure the writing aligns with the publication’s voice and style.
- Syntax and Flow:
- Improve sentence structure and paragraph organization to enhance the flow of the text.
- Ensure transitions between ideas are smooth, improving the overall coherence of the writing.
- Correcting Inconsistencies and Redundance:
- Remove unnecessary words, phrases, or repetitive content that does not add value.
- Tighten the writing to make it more concise and impactful.
- Formatting:
- Check formatting for adherence to submission guidelines, such as margins, font sizes, headings, and citations.
- If not in use, please add Heading Styles (i.e. Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.) to separate the sections, beginning with Heading 2.
- 1” Margins across the file.
- Times New Roman in 12 pts.
- For hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes use, respectively: - – and —.
- Ensure that the layout is clean and professional.
- References and Citations:
- Ensure citations and references are formatted correctly according to the Chicago Manual of Style.
- Verify that citations are complete and accurate (e.g., in academic writing).
- Ensuring Adherence to Journal Author Guidelines:
- Make sure the content follows any provided editorial guidelines or submission requirements (e.g., word count limits, formatting rules).
- Author biographies (200–250 words) are included at the bottom of the document.
- There should be no image files in the document. If there are, notify the editors
- Legal and Ethical Compliance:
- Alert authors to any potential libelous or defamatory content.
- Ensure proper attribution and avoid plagiarism.
These guidelines were created based on the advice for copy editing from scholar Wendy Laura Belcher’s website.