Guidelines for Exhibit Authors

Exhibits are digital scholarly publications that may be experimental in a variety of ways. To some extent, simply publishing a traditionally framed article in digital form alters the way the article will be read and used. We expect the intertextual ecology of the exhibits and the WWO textbase to have an important influence on how these materials speak to readers. But the flexibility of the exhibit format lends itself to experimentation and we encourage authors to think creatively about how they might take advantage of the digital medium to make new kinds of arguments or critical interventions. Exhibits have several reading and display options, with contextual details for the persons and texts discussed, a timeline view showing significant events, and links to additional readings and information. We welcome submissions on any topic germane to the study of early women's writing in English (i.e. the texts and content domain covered by Women Writers Online). Please see below for details on the submission and review process.

Writing an Exhibit

Form

Online exhibits should be topically focused and should allow you to write useful and briefly about a specific insight. We do not require submissions to be at the scale of a full-fledged scholarly article. Exhibits may come in the form of a collection of material curated under a particular theme (war, science, biographical background, etc.) or they may be more like essays which, rather than quoting from primary sources, actually link directly to those sources. Keep in mind the goal of the exhibit is to direct readers' attention to the WWO collection and to suggest connections, patterns, and interpretations that increase their understanding of and interest in the texts. The ideal exhibit raises questions that bring the reader further into the WWO collection, and the distinctive feature of our exhibits is the linkages they provide to Women Writers Online. These might take several forms:

• links to entire texts
• links to quotations—that is, to specific passages from a WWO text or texts. The quoted material might appear in the exhibit itself together with a link to the full text, or the exhibit might simply offer the link (e.g. "As Margaret Fell argues [link], etc. etc.").
• links which execute searches, or which link to precompiled search results: for instance, a link that performs a search for a specific word of interest. (E.g. "Although the word 'feminine' is rare before 1600 [link]...")

Length

Think of exhibits as falling between a very short article to a full article in length, but with the added flexibility of the digital medium. Exhibits of almost any length may be submitted, but a practical range might be from at least one substantial paragraph to a book chapter. On the shorter end, the paragraph would need to be very substantive and suggestive; on the longer end, the piece would truly have to earn the space by holding the reader's attention.

Audience

Our audience spans students and scholars of diverse levels. Exhibits should engage readers across a spectrum of academic perspectives. Their style should be free from esoteric jargon, but should not be oversimplified: they should address an audience of intelligent readers who may not be familiar with the field.

Images

Images and other multimedia objects may be included in submissions. In fact, contributors are encouraged to include images when possible, or at least to indicate how images might be used in conjunction with the submission; we would also welcome visualizations or maps relevant to the material in the exhibit. Permissions should be secured by the individual contributor, although the WWP may be able to offer assistance in some cases.

Licensing and Copyright

Starting May 2023, new exhibits will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license; copyright for all materials remains with their authors. Creative Commons also publishes plain-language version describing the provisions of this license. Please contact us at wwp@neu.edu if you have questions about licensing.

Submission and Review Process

Submissions should be sent by email to wwp@neu.edu. Submissions should be sent in plain text or Microsoft Word format. Please do not send PDF. If you would like to try authoring an exhibit in XML, please contact us.

All submissions will be reviewed by the WWP editorial team and, where appropriate, by one or more outside reviewers. In most cases, reviewers will suggest or require revisions. You can read more about our philosophy of peer review and scholarly publication here.

If you have further questions, or would like to propose an idea for an exhibit, please contact us at wwp@neu.edu.