WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
Anvil is interested in publishing innovative scholarship in the digital humanities. Of course, “digital humanities” can cover a wide variety of research practices and products. What the term means to us is any scholarship that relies on digital methods for its central argument and that uses the web as its primary medium for presentation. Examples might include text mining and analysis with, say, an interactive visual display of findings (accompanied by an essay that fully explains the author’s hypothesis, methodology, and interpretation of findings as they impact a wider field of discourse); or perhaps a series of video explorations and analyses of a particular humanities database. In general, we are looking for work that fully integrates digital constructions as both means and ends.
WHAT WE AREN’T LOOKING FOR
We aren’t accepting projects whose sole mode of authorship is a word processing program (Microsoft Word and others). Narrative text is still one of the most effective ways for communicating ideas—and we welcome textual components as integral to research and scholarship. What we want to avoid, however, is simply replicating the print article or monograph on the web or ordered from essay writing services.
TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Because of our current scale, Anvil will not be the primary host for most of our publications. We do have some developmental server space, but right now this is reserved for WordPress-based pre-publication review (using CommentPress) and lightweight production (using PressBooks). For this reason, technical specifications will largely be up to each institutional host for separate Anvil publications. Nonetheless, we do recommend that all projects, regardless of hosting environment, adhere to good web design standards, including:
- Markup that validates to XHTML 1.0 or HTML 5 DOCTYPE (“test early and test often”: http://validator.w3.org).
- Accessible design: testing with the Web Accessibility Evaluation tool (http://wave.webaim.org); using alt tag descriptors wherever applicable; labeling form controls; and generally understanding and implementing accessible web design wherever possible.
GET IN TOUCH!
Anvil is happy to talk about your project at any stage of its development. Just get in touch with Fred Moody (fmoody@nitle.org), our editor-in-chief, with initial inquiries.
If your work is in more advanced stages and you have a formal publishing proposal for us to consider, we ask that these submissions include:
- A detailed statement outlining the project’s arguments, themes, and significance to your discipline
- An annotated “table of contents,” or analogous outline of your proposed publication
- A discussion of your proposed work in the context of existing literature in its field
- A description of its intended audience
- Links, if available, to samples you expect to include in the finished work
- An explanation of the necessity for this work to be digital and how digital technology enhances or advances your scholarship
- A detailing of the technical dimensions and requirements of your project
- Curriculum vitae