about us

The transformation of the academy by the digital dispensation presents challenges to customary ways of learning, teaching, conducting research, interpreting documents, and presenting findings. It also offers immense opportunities in each of these areas. New media enable oration, graphics, objects, and even embodied performance to supplement existing forms of scholarly production as well as to constitute entirely original platforms. Opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration have expanded enormously, information has been made more accessible, and research made more efficient on multiple levels. We scholars are called upon now, with some urgency, to adapt our investigative and pedagogical methods to an academic climate deluged by a superabundance of information and analysis. This has created opportunities for open-ended and multiform engagements, interactive and continually updating archives, databases, cartographic applications that enrich the geographic imagination with historical information, and online dialogues with our colleagues and the wider public.

The need for such engagements is especially immediate among the people of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Information technology has become an increasingly significant part of the way that those in the region frame pressing social problems and political aspirations. Moreover, the Internet is analogous in important ways to the Caribbean itself as a dynamic and fluid cultural space: it is generated from disparate places and by disparate peoples; it challenges fundamentally the geographical and physical barriers that disrupt or disallow connection; and it places others and elsewheres in relentless relation. Yet while we celebrate these opportunities for connectedness, we also must make certain that our work in the digital realm undermines and confronts rather than re-inscribes forms of silencing and exclusion in the Caribbean.

Our own impetus for creating a new platform arose from this continued need to raise the voices of those working to understand the impact of technology on our scholarly and cultural pursuits. At this very hybrid moment, caught between the analog and the electronic, systems of production, validation, and distribution of our scholarly and cultural work have reified to benefit large monopolies—indexers, database brokers, software vendors—whose ultimate motive is profit. In order to keep these large economic sectors thriving, access has been regimented. As Caribbeanist scholars, we find ourselves in the double-bind of a new master’s house, both infrastructurally and historically. Stewards of an archive that cannot be disentangled from The Archive housed at major global institutions—whose mechanical image lies outside our control—and of our fragile, opaque archives in their saltpetered warehouses at the margins, we have committed to join those who are active in the design of our future memory.

As the academy increasingly embraces the “digital turn,” we ask the following: How might we, as editors, publishers, and ourselves Caribbeanist scholars, encourage and facilitate our colleagues' investment in the production and dissemination of the knowledge they generate? How will we go about cultivating both producers and reviewers of quality digital scholarship, and how will we help to ensure that this scholarship is recognized and rewarded by the profession? How might we encourage collaboration with, increase accessibility for, and otherwise work to narrow the gap between Caribbeanist researchers, especially those in the North Atlantic academy, and the communities we are committed to serving?

To answer these and other urgent questions, we need in this moment to engage two critical functions: to understand and to build. For us, these functions do not follow one from the other, but rather operate in tandem. As such, we have thought through our platform with the same critical eye we cast on the archive, and our resulting infrastructure embodies our principles. We are fully open access and charge no author fees. Our authors retain their copyright. We pursue best indexing, accessibility, and archival practices. We emphasize the primacy of “sustainable authorship in plain text.” Our website and PDFs are generated from the same markdown files using Jekyll and ConTeXt, respectively. The resulting website is light-weight and mobile-friendly, acknowledging the importance of mobile phones, bandwidth differentials, and data costs in the Caribbean. We version and share our software and data freely on GitHub. We have reduced the workflow for producing a journal to a small team and a small budget, and we offer our production knowledge to those who would ask for it.

As we build and understand, we do so illuminated by the first light of the long arc of Caribbean remembrance, from Maroon communities to the recent collaborative efforts to build a Digital Library of the Caribbean. We do so remaining ever vigilant to materialist, ecological, identitarian, and liberatory considerations. We do so, in the last instance, fully conscious of our decades-old wrangling of computers—from Kamau Brathwaite’s Sycorax to the ingenious scholar-hackers of today’s Havana or the model work of Create Caribbean in Dominica. Our cutting edge comes, then, not from a misguided sense of techno-utopianism—or worse, techno-determinism—but as a new small axe, hacking away still at that master’s house.

In depth look…

Editorial Policies

Open Access

archipelagos is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to users or institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publishers.

We do not charge article processing nor article submission charges to authors. Authors retain their copyright and agree to license their articles with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The technological stack used for archipelagos is offered with an MIT license. All of our data is open on our Github repository.

Academic Standards

All articles are peer-reviewed using the double-blind method. All digital projects are peer-reviewed single blind. Project reviews are edited by the journal editors. We screen for plagiarism during our review process.

Distribution and Preservation

We provide DOIs for all articles. Citation information and DOIs can be found on the drawer sidebar for each individual article. Each article also provides metadata in the following standards in the HTML code:

Dublin Core (For general metadata needs)
Open Graph (For social media distribution)
Highwire Press (For Google Scholar)

Copies of articles will be archived on Yale University’s repository Eli Scholar. We are also archived in LOCKSS.

Valences

In chemistry, a valence describes the different ways an atom can bond with others. We borrow the term for the different ways scholarly and creative work can engage with archipelagos: two forms of essay — one built on sustained argument, the other narrating the process behind a digital project — alongside two ways of reviewing digital scholarship itself, an edited dialogue with a project’s creators or a standalone critical review. Because so much Caribbean digital scholarship takes shape outside the conventional article, each valence is reviewed on its own terms, attentive to the specific kind of labor it represents. The sections below detail the submission requirements and review process for each.

Valence 1a | Critical Essays

Critical Essays are 6000–8000-word articles that showcase groundbreaking, argument-based reflections on the theory, methods, and practices of digital scholarship and scholarship on the digital within the frame of Caribbean Studies.

Submission Description

An essay that presents a clear argument relevant to the field of Caribbean digital studies, broadly understood. All valence 1a essays go through a double-blind peer review process.

All submissions should be:

within 6000–8000 words
double-spaced and follow the Chicago Manual of Style
written in English, French, Dutch, Papiamentu/o, or Spanish
submitted in .docx or .md format.

Articles including images or other multimedia elements should follow the formatting instructions under for authors in the journal’s website.

Please familiarize yourself with the review process below, and see our reviewer guidelines for critical essays for the full evaluation criteria. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at: archipelagosjournal@gmail.com.

Review Process

Authors submit a guideline-compliant essay.
Reviewers evaluate and offer initial feedback within five weeks of receiving the essay, answering the questions outlined below and then sending feedback to the journal editors (archipelagosjournal@gmail.com).
Editors read reviewer feedback and notify both authors and reviewers of the final publication decision.
If accepted for publication, but with minor or major revisions, authors revise their submission within four weeks.
Authors have a final opportunity to provide minor edits once the final proofs have been prepared.

Valence 1b | Process Essays

Process Essays are 4000–6000-word articles that showcase work related to the theory, methods, and practices of digital project construction.

Submission Description

An essay written by project authors that foregrounds the labor and decision-making processes of bringing digital scholarship projects to fruition. These essays propose narratives of project development and infrastructure creation and/or provide details about new major features/stages of the digital project in question. All valence 1b articles are subject to a single-blind peer review process.

All submissions should be:

within 4000–6000 words
double-spaced and follow the Chicago Manual of Style
written in English, French, Dutch, Papiamentu/o, or Spanish
submitted in .docx or .md format

Articles including images or other multimedia elements should follow the formatting instructions under for authors in the journal’s website.

Please familiarize yourself with the review process below, and see our reviewer guidelines for process essays for the full evaluation criteria. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at: archipelagosjournal@gmail.com.

Review Process

Authors submit a guideline-compliant essay.
Reviewers evaluate and offer initial feedback within five weeks of receiving the essay, answering the questions outlined below and then sending feedback to the journal editors (archipelagosjournal@gmail.com).
Editors read reviewer feedback and notify both authors and reviewers of the final publication decision.
If accepted for publication, but with minor or major revisions, authors revise their submission within four weeks.
Authors have a final opportunity to provide minor edits once the final proofs have been prepared.

Valence 2 | Digital Project Dialogues

Dialogues comprise synthesized critical exchanges in prose between the authors and reviewers of a publicly available, typically mid-stage digital project.

Submission Description

A concise and edited exchange between site author(s) and reviewer(s) of a publicly available digital project. Reviewers evaluate the Project Statement prepared for them by the project authors along with the online digital project and submit comments to editors. Before publication, the journal editors revise and consolidate both author and reviewer notes. The published outcome is a nuanced conversation around digital scholarship on the Caribbean between reviewer and authors. All valence 2 essays go through a single-blind peer review process.

All author submissions should be:

within 500–700 words (Project Statement)
double-spaced and follow the Chicago Manual of Style using Notes-Bibliography format.
written in Dutch, English, French, Papiamentu/o, or Spanish
submitted in .docx or .md format

Articles including images or other multimedia elements should follow the formatting instructions under for authors in the journal's website.

Please familiarize yourself with the review process below, and see our reviewer guidelines for digital project dialogues for the full evaluation criteria. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at: archipelagosjournal@gmail.com.

Review Process

Project authors submit a Project Statement of 500 to 700 words explaining their goals and the rationale of their decision-making.
Reviewers prepare an evaluation of the Project Statement and the online digital project site based on the questions outlined later in this document. The assessment should be sent within five weeks to the journal's email address: (archipelagosjournal@gmail.com).
Editors anonymize and share reviewer feedback with authors. If applicable, authors work on revising their project to incorporate reviewer comments and provide a link to the revised version (under development or publicly published).
Project authors submit a 1000-to-2000-word narrative responding to reviewer feedback and explaining how they addressed (or plan to address) any concerns. This response is sent directly to the journal, and not shared with reviewers prior to publication.
Before publication, editors condense both author and reviewer perspectives to create a dialogue between both parties. The final version generally ranges between 2000-to-6000 words.

Valence 3 | Digital Project Reviews

Submission Description

A brief reviewer-authored essay commenting on the merits and development of a public digital project. The review includes a paragraph-length description of the project in question followed by the review itself. The section is akin in format and length to scholarly book reviews. As opposed to valence 2 (Dialogue Review) submissions, there is no dialog between project creators and reviewers.

All submissions should be:

within 1000–2000 words in length
double-spaced and follow the Chicago Manual of Style
written in English, French, Dutch, Papiamentu/o, or Spanish
submitted in .docx or .md format

Review Process

Editors solicit public reviews from reviewers directly or accept proposals from reviewers for consideration on a rolling basis. Editors work directly with reviewers to ensure the quality of the essay.
Reviewers evaluate a digital project and send a 1000-to-2000-word essay within five weeks of confirming the review. They answer the questions posed below and send their first draft to archipelagosjournal@gmail.com.
Reviewers revise their submission based on the editors' feedback and send their final, revised submission to the journal.

For the full evaluation criteria reviewers use for external reviews of digital projects, see our reviewer guidelines for digital project reviews. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at: archipelagosjournal@gmail.com.

Our Workflow

Part of what makes archipelagos unique is our work-flow, carefully designed to minimize production costs, and allow our small team to run a robust academic journal, without paid services outside server costs and DOI provision. While every journal will have unique requirements and resources available to the team, we believe that our open source software stack combined with our work-flow provides a viable, portable model. The work-flow below is the next step after the original set-up is in place.

New elements

The defining characteristic of our work-flow is the division into two stages of production by the types of computer files handled: The Word Stage and the Markdown Stage. While we continue to work for a world where authors structure their own documents, reducing overall costs further, we are cognizant of ingrained work habits, and have designed our work accordingly.

The second major requirement for our work-flow is the expanded role of the copy-editor. After receiving training in producing and editing well-formatted YAML/Markdown documents, our copy-editor is responsible for ensuring the smooth transition from the first stage to the next.

The third requirement is knowledge of static site generation (Jekyll, GitHub, etc.) by a member of the team. In our case this is one of the editors—called the editor-tech below. For the sake of sustainability, we are in the process of passing on these skills to other team members and friends of the project.

The Production of Articles

N.B. We understand each stage of a text’s life-cycle from first draft to production as a different version of the text, abbreviated here as v1, v2, etc.

I. The Word Stage

In this stage, all exchanges can take place in Microsoft Word, as long as all parties abide by the style guidelines documented on the journal site. Editors will keep copies of all versions in this stage on Dropbox. No promise of preservation is made for this stage.

CFP goes out
Contributors submit abstract to Editors over email
Contributors submits v1 to Editors over email
Editors sends to Peer Reviewers over email as received
Peer Reviewers evaluate work (1 month from receipt)
Editors responds to Contributors with reports based on peer-review work
Contributors make revisions & send v2 back to Editors via email (1 month from receipt)
Editors share all v2s with Copy-Editor in Dropbox
Copy-Editor makes v3, shares in Dropbox with Editors & sends to Contributors via email.
Contributors make v4 with Track Changes and send to Copy-Editor along with Ancillary Materials (bio, abstracts and multimedia content). Copy-Editor places all files in appropriate folder in Dropbox.
Copy-Editor makes v5
CE shares set of v5 without Track Changes + Ancillary Materials with Editors in Dropbox.
Editors obtain DOIs

II. The Markdown Stage

In this stage we transition to markdown work-flows, out of which both the site and the PDFs are generated. All edits by Copy Editor and Editor should happen on Github at this stage.

Editor-tech converts v5 to markdown using Pandoc
Editor-tech uploads v5.md to Github & creates draft of web issue for internal use.
Editor-tech generates v5 as PDFs, & shares with Copy-Editor on Dropbox.
Copy-Editor sends v5.pdf to Contributors as Final Proof
Contributors annotate v5.pdf with minor changes & sends back to Copy-Editor.
Copy-Editor incorporates minor changes to v5.pdf in the markdown file on Github to create v6.
Editors review and test the final issue to ensure quality.
Publication