Contributors’ Guidelines

Historic guidelines provided to contributors

General

Ada intends to be accessible at a number of different levels. First, we want to make feminist research on gender, media, and technology available to a broad audience – an audience that may have access to the internet, but not to university libraries or traditional peer-reviewed journals. Second, we want to encourage contributions that are accessible to a diverse and fundamentally interdisciplinary readership. You should thus assume that readers are interested in your subject, but may not have specialized knowledge, so be aware of how you use jargon. You may want to “translate” or explain any specialized disciplinary terms in an end note. Editors will be paying close attention to issues relating to audience and are open to discussion on these matters.

In addition, we also anticipate an increasingly international audience, which means that you will need to pay attention to slang and colloquialisms that may be difficult for readers in Ghana, Hong Kong, Mumbai, or Tokyo to understand. Constantly ask yourself whether your contribution can be understood by an international readership, which is often using English as a second or third language.

Copyright

We publish the creator’s choice of Creative Commons License, but this is negotiable with authors. The issue editors must obtain permissions and choices of license from the authors (using the appropriate form—see below).

Issue editors are responsible for getting signed permissions (the authors’ final submission form), which include the authors’ choice of license.

The Editor and Advisory Board are responsible for putting the right license onto the article involved.

Submissions

Submissions should be sent by email to the editors. You will receive an acknowledgment within ten days of receipt. If you don’t, feel free to send an additional email – sometimes messages get filtered or lost in crowded inboxes. Ada does not review manuscripts that are being considered elsewhere. Once you have submitted a piece to Ada, it should not be submitted to another publication.

In general, follow these procedures:

1. Word length

Word length for articles and bibliographic essays will be specified in the CFP for each issue, but as a general rule we encourage submissions of no more than 5,000 words, inclusive of endnotes, bibliographies, and acknowledgments. Titles should be no longer than 120 characters.

2. Submission Procedures

Send as email attachment as a “rich text format” (RTF) file. Include in the email message a statement of which system and program has been used. Send email to the editors of the issue involved, as per the Call for Papers.

If you are submitting in some other format than text, write to the editors, as above, first.

Images should be sent as separate files as either GIF or JPG. Do not embed images into word documents. Try to keep file sizes to a minimum to speed download.

3. All submissions should be accompanied by the following information included in the email that accompanies your submission:

• Name(s), Institutional affiliation(s), email(s) addresses of the person(s) submitting
• Title of the text and the issue for which it is submitted. Please limit titles to 140 characters or less
• An abstract of no more than 200 words
• A list of five key words or tags for your contribution
• A short paragraph (40-60 words) about the contributor(s), giving the kind of information that readers may wish to know, such as name, institutional affiliation, leadership roles, recent publications, research interests. This paragraph should appear immediately after the last paragraph of the article.

4. Layout for articles NOT submitted in HTML

• General rule – keep it simple, avoid formatting. This means: Use single spacing between lines, justify on left only
• Do not use tabs at any time. Mark paragraph breaks with one extra “hard return”
• Do not use bold or underlining at any time. For emphasis or titles, use italics
• Notes should not be embedded into the text. When end-noting, place the number of the endnote after the text in brackets and add the endnote to the bottom of the article: e.g. the text goes here and the endnote reference comes after. [1]
• NB: the endnote reference comes AFTER and not before the full-stop. Use square not curly brackets. Try and avoid placing the endnote reference mid-sentence – i.e. place endnote reference at the end of the sentence where possible.

5. Quotations

• Use single quotation marks for quotes less than two lines long, and run these in the text.
• Use in-text referencing, with reference details after the ‘quote’ (May, 2002: 34).
• Indent quotes three or more lines long by 1 cm, without quotation marks, in a separate paragraph. Do not indent right margin.
• Do not italicize quotes, except for emphasis. Acknowledge added emphasis immediately after the citation as “my emphasis”: e.g. (Ronell, 1989: 186; my emphasis).
• Quotes within quotes should be distinguished by double quotation marks e.g. Hansen (110) speaks of a 1908 article which ‘emphasizes a German exhibitor’s efforts to procure “scenes from the Rocky Mountains, forest views, and flowing cascades”.’ (Single quotation marks surround the quote from Hansen at p.110; double quotation marks surround the words quoted by Hansen at this point).

6. Reference Style Guide

IF you have no references, please list SUGGESTED FURTHER READING at the end of your piece.

In general, we use Chicago style, but we also accept other recognized styles such as MLA and American Psychological Association, which are based on putting page references in the text and bibliography at the end of the article. Our preference is to have style consistent across a given issue and to leave the decision about which style to use (which may depend on the disciplinary focus of the issue) up to the special editor.

Please Note: Please do not auto-number your endnote references but insert the reference number ‘manually’ in both the text, and in the Notes. Auto-numbering creates difficulty for those putting the document online.

7. Technical Guidelines – Submissions

• Text: Text should be formatted in either rich text format (RTF) or HTML 4.0. Use single spacing and left-alignment. Do not use tabs at any time. Mark paragraph breaks with one extra “hard return”. Do not use bold or underlining at any time: for emphasis or titles, use italics.
• Images: If your article is an entire image or the image is central to understanding the rest of the text, then the image should be a minimum of 300 dpi and in TIFF version 6 uncompressed (.tif) file format.
• Supplemental Images: Images should be sent as separate files as either GIF or JPG. Do not embed images into word documents.
• Audio: Audio files should be submitted in either Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) (.flac) or Waveform Audio Format (WAV) (.wav). Transcript files are recommended but not required. Follow text guidelines for transcripts.
• Supplemental audio: Non-critical audio files may be submitted in MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (.mp3) format.
• Video: Video files should be submitted in either MPEG-4 High Profile (.mp4) or JPEG 2000 (.mj2). Transcript files are recommended but not required. Follow text guidelines for transcripts.
• Interactive: Interactive media files such as Flash may be submitted; however, rtf files for the text, individual image, audio, video and other components should be submitted as well. A brief narrative description of the context and how the elements interact should also be provided.