Guest Contributor Guidelines


Tips for writing your post

  • All posts should be written in an accessible language, free of academic and industry jargon, and in a first person voice.  
  • It’s best to ask someone who isn’t familiar with your work or even the field to review your post.
  • Keep in mind that our audience consists of ethnographers and non-ethnographers who work in industry and/or academia.

Submission Checklist

  1. Draft Post

Here is the checklist of next steps for guest contributors when posts have been accepted.

  • create a WordPress account
  • upload your profile headshot to your wordpress account
  • add your bio to your wordpress account with link to your twitter
  • accept our WordPress invite to create a draft post on Ethnography Matters.
  • create your draft in Ethnography Matters
  • enter in all relevant tags in tag section
  • your draft post contains all relevant URL links
  • your post contains at least one high-res image at the beginning of the post (Flickr’s Advanced Search is a great place to find Creative Commons-licensed images!). We encourage the use of multimedia and visuals.
  • provide proper captions and attributions (Please see contributors guidelines for proper licensing and attribution).
  • your draft post has been copy-edited by another person
  • you have asked at least 1 non-specialist (someone not familiar with your content) to read your post 
  1. Summarize

Once your post is drafted, we ask that you provide us with a summary of your post so that we can effectively share it.

  1. Finalize and Publish

Once you’ve filled out the new post template, you will work with your editor on any necessary revisions before publishing.

  • communicate with your editor on revisions, s/he will also revise your twitter headlines and post summaries in the new post template
  • your editor will notify you when s/he will publish your post, please note that you do not click publish.
  • the EM team will share your post across their social media channels
  • share your post with your audience (twitter, facebook, email)
  • Once we publish your post, please monitor and respond to comments on their post because this is an important way for readers to engage in dialogue with you.
  • To participate in conversations about your article, we suggest that you join our mailing list, following @ethnomatters on twitter, and join the EThnography Hangout Slack
  • We highly encourage guest contributors to be active on Twitter for the same reason as above

Sample posts for inspiration

The most popular posts by the editors:

The editors’ selection of their favorite posts from guest contributors:

Licensing

All posts are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 unported license. Authors retain copyright but the posts are licensed under the Creative Commons so that others are allowed to copy and publish the work elsewhere for noncommercial purposes, as long as they attribute the author and the site and use the same terms applied here.

For photograph/illustration licensing, please add a caption to the photograph with information about the author of the photograph as well as any license/copyright information using one of the following:

  • All rights reserved If you are using photographs/illustrations that you took/made and do not want them to carry the same license (i.e. CC BY NC SA) then you need to specify in the caption that they are ‘all rights reserved’ (this is because the whole site carries the CC license so we have to specify which content does NOT carry this license). See an example in this post.  
  • Creative Commons licensed If you are using CC-licensed photographs from Flickr or elsewhere, then make sure you attribute the photographs properly, noting the author, the site where it was published and the license terms. See an example in this post.
  • Copyright with permission If you are using a copyrighted image with permission, then please make it clear who the copyright holder is and that you have gained permission
  • Copyright under fair use/fair dealing If you are using a copyrighted image under fair use/fair dealing terms, then make that clear as well (just talk to us about it because this can be a complex issue).