When preparing a final version of your submission, please keep in mind that the abstracts will not be thoroughly copy-edited. In particular, this applies to grammar and spelling. Please make sure, then, that you submit a carefully-proofread revision. Even if we plan to cross-check the abstracts for typographic and bibliographic consistency, it will not be aimed at introducing any major changes.
Below, we briefly address the most important elements of style. This list is not exhausted, nevertheless following the guidelines will solve several potential issues, and it will help to prepare the Book of Abstracts on time.
1. General remarks
1.1. The word limit for paper abstracts is 1,500 words and 750 for posters, exclusive of references. Abstracts which exceed this limit will be returned.
1.2. Images should be supplied at 300 dpi and uncompressed where possible. Screenshots will normally be the only exception, and these should be supplied at the highest possible resolution. Acceptable formats include TIFF, JPEG and PNG.
1.3. The Book of Abstracts will be published on-line and in print, but the printed version will be black and white only. Do not include colour formatting in your text, and please select your images with this in mind.
1.4. Conference organizers will accept final copy submitted in a DHC format only. This is a dedicated format produced by the Convalidator webservice, or a tool to, among other things, automatically convert Word and Open Office documents to TEI-compliant validated XML. To use the Convalidator, please go to: http://www.adho.org/dhconvalidator-dh2016/
and log in using your ConfTool username and password. You will be asked to select an input format of your submission (Word or OpenOffice). Then, a template will be generated – please copy-paste your original abstract to this template. You will find further guidelines concerning text formatting in the template. Having done this, upload your abstract to the Convalidator service, and start the conversion. The final DHC file is ready to be uploaded into ConfTool: https://www.conftool.pro/dh2016/.
2. Typescript text
2.1. For the sake of interoperability, any mathematical formulae should be included as images.
2.2. Please use double quotation marks (double inverted commas) to “quote someone’s words,” italics are restricted to indicate titles (e.g. Roman van Walewein). To emphasize particular words or phrases, use bold font; try not to overuse emphasizing, though.
2.3. Put periods and commas into quotation marks, as in the example immediately above.
2.4. In section headings, do not capitalize main words (e.g. Texts used in this study). No full stop should be used at the end of the heading.
2.5. No full stop should be used at the end of Figures’ captions.
3. Bibliographic references
3.1. In principle, bibliographic references should follow a variant of the Harvard bibliographic system as used by the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities journal:
http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/index.html
3.2. We are fully aware that scholars in general, and digital humanists in particular, have difficulties with obeying bibliographic conventions. Remembering where to put commas and where parentheses, deciding where to italicize the titles where to put them into double quotes – it might be frustrating, and usually is. If you belong to this prominent group of scholars, you are strongly recommended to use one of the automatic reference systems, such as Zotero.
3.3. We skip an introduction to Zotero here; there are tons of relevant materials on-line, e.g. here or here.
3.4. A dedicated style definition for this year’s Book of Abstracts can be found here (or on GitHub). After downloading, double click the file to have it installed. Activate the style in Zotero and complete writing your manuscript. The above style definition is written in the CSL language, so that it can be used in other reference managers.
3.5. Before uploading your document to the Convalidator, make sure that you remove any field codes from your document (save the original document, though). Have a look here if you are not sure how to do it.
3.6. If you prefer do include the references manually, please read carefully the following instructions, and double-check your manuscript for consistency. In particular, check whether any references are missing.
3.7. Do not use footnotes. Instead, put your references in parenthesis, adding a comma between the name and the year (Hoover, 2007). Page numbers, if applicable, should be preceded by a colon (Pennebaker, 2011: 145); works published by two co-authors should be referenced using “and” rather than “&” (Sinclair and Rockwell, 2014), works by more than two authors should be shortened using “et al.” (Baayen et al., 1996: 125).
3.8. In any bibliographic style, there are countless possible variants of particular entries (for a monograph, for unpublished archive materials, for a critical edition, and so forth). However, we propose to consider the following rule of thumb. In principle, Digital Humanities scholars usually deal with one of four major types of publications: (1) a book, (2) an article in a journal, (3) a chapter in a book, (4) an abstract in conference proceedings. Other types of publications are basically derived from these four variants. In your References section, pay special attention to these four types of publications, and adjust the other types accordingly:
Baayen, H., Halteren, H. van and Tweedie, F. (1996). Outside the cave of shadows: using syntactic annotation to enhance authorship attribution. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 11(3): 121–32.
Hoover, D. (2007). Quantitative analysis and literary studies. In Schreibman, S. and Siemens, R. (eds), A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Blackwell, pp. 517–33.
Pennebaker, J. W. (2011). The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say about Us. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Sinclair, S. and Rockwell, G. (2014). Towards an archaeology of text analysis tools. Digital Humanities 2014: Conference Abstracts. Lausanne: EPFL and UNIL, pp. 359–60.
3.9. Please keep in mind that regardless of the type of referenced material, a bibliographic entry begins with bold font, followed by a year in parenthesis and a full stop. Then goes the title followed by another full stop. In journals, the title and the issue are separeted by a comma. Also, please mind a difference between indicating pages for journals and for book chapters. Page ranges are abbreviated so that at least two digits are kept in the second number when it has two or more digits. Yes, it is extremely complicated – hence please consider using Zotero.
4. Contact
Should you have any questions about formatting and abstract submissions, please address them to the local organizers:
abstracts