Proposal Submission Guidelines

General Information

Proposals for materials to be posted on the site of the Digital Renaissance Editions should be submitted by email to the Coordinating Editor, Brett Greatley-Hirsch, b.d.greatleyhirsch@leeds.ac.uk. All proposals will be considered by the Editorial Board, which meets twice yearly (in May and November); the Coordinating Editor is happy to provide feedback on draft submissions before these dates.

Proposals may be submitted by individuals or by a group of collaborating scholars. Proposals may be for editions of early English plays, dramatic fragments, or relevant texts in other genres; they may also be for the preparation of supporting documents (sources, adaptations, etc.) or for the development of performance materials. In the case of plays with multiple source texts, (Doctor Faustus, etc.) proposals for single-text editions will also be considered.

All correspondence will be carried out by email, and all work in progress and final submission will be submitted by email, on disk, or uploaded via Dropbox. Contributors should be reasonably computer literate and should have a basic knowledge of textual encoding or mark-up languages, such as HTML or XHTML. (That said, the learning-curve is not particularly steep.)

For further information about the submission procedures and other editorial matters, consult the Editorial Guidelines or contact the Coordinating Editor.

Proposal Format

While different works will require proposals of differing detail, the overall length of the proposal should normally not exceed 4,000 words (though additional materials may be submitted as appendices).

All proposals should include the following:

1. A brief curriculum vitae of the contributor(s).
2. A statement of the contributorʼs general views on editorial principles.
3. A statement of the main editorial challenges involved in working with the specific text(s).
4. A statement of the way an electronic edition of the play might differ from a printed edition.
5. A summary of the kinds of supporting materials that will be linked to the edition (sources, adaptations, historical and contextual documents, etc.).
6. A timeline for completion of the project.

   The electronic medium allows for incremental publication as work is completed, as well as the progressive correction of errors as they are detected. Collation and work on the old-spelling transcriptions should be completed before the modern text is created. Editors will receive a template for the modern text generated from the old-spelling transcription, with tagging in place.

   A reasonable timeline will specify dates of completion for the main components of the edition:
   
   (1) The old-spelling transcription(s);
   (2) Collations;
   (3) The modern-spelling text;
   (4) Annotations (of three levels of depth);
   (5) Introductory essays (textual and contextual, etc.); and,
   (6) Supplementary materials.

7. An indication of the expertise of the contributor(s) in the use of electronic texts and the Internet.

Submission Process

The proposal will form the basis of an Agreement to Publish between the editor(s) and Digital Renaissance Editions. As such, the proposal is likely to require revision after initial submission. The Coordinating Editor will work with the editor(s) to revise the proposal, ensuring that it addresses all comments and suggestions from the Editorial Board. In some cases, the General Textual Editors may request a second round of review.

Once all parties are satisfied with the revisions, the Coordinating Editor will issue two copies of an Agreement to Publish. The editor(s) will counter-sign and return one copy of the Agreement to the Coordinating Editor.