A newsletter to learn about practical ways to decolonize your research and data work-lives with byte-sized drabbles about the daily life of a data professional.

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Industry Insights: How to Start Publishing

I love writing-stories, poems, museum exhibit text, articles, book chapters, and more. But it may seem daunting. There are a lot of different ways and venues that you can publish your work. Publishing helps build your portfolio, which is important if your data work isn’t something inherently visual or you can’t share screenshots/examples because of confidentiality issues.

If you’re unsure where to even start, begin with a magazine or newsletter. Magazines and newsletters require low-word counts and are typically regional. These venues showcase practical work so write about a project you’re working on, how you approach finding aids, or that new acquisition of irregular formats your Archive received.

Here are some venues to consider for topics related to archives, history, librarianship, curators, catalogers, digital asset managers, and taxonomists:

• Archival Outlook. It’s the official magazine of the Society of American Archivists and you only need one page of text (700 words).

• Archiving Houston (Archivists of the Houston Area)

• Mid-Atlantic Archivist (MARAC - regional for Delaware, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia). Email your pitch to [email protected].

• MARAC Blog. Email [email protected].

Industry Insights: Advanced Publishing

There is no “normal” or “best” publishing venue. You get clout for publishing books if you’re a freelancer, consultant, or have a job title like “director", “dean,” “founder.” Librarians usually publish book chapters in edited volumes. I often see digital asset managers and archivists publish journal articles in technical publications. And UX designers, data analysts, indie developers, and others might typically publish forum posts, blog posts, magazine articles, GitHub pages, or video games on Steam.

Apps, Video Games, and Widgets

If you code, publish your video game on Steam and other developer assets on itch.io. Itch.io is good for game assets (tilesets, backgrounds, fonts, etc) but not great at selling or advertising your video game. It can be daunting to publish on Steam and pricey (because you must pay $100 USD to add a Steam game); but Steam is your best bet to get eyes on your work and make money. You’re also taken more seriously when you say your game is on Steam because it puts your work next to big publishers.

Journal Articles

Pick a journal based on your niche topic. Don’t be afraid to publish outside the “data” category-like a journal made for history, psychology, culture, film, or education. Catalogers might like Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. Digital asset managers might like the Journal of Digital Media Management. UX designers might like Human-Computer Interaction.

There are two ways to write for journals: you pick a journal and then pick your topic so it fits their scope OR you write an abstract/come up with the idea then pick the journal. Never write an entire article from scratch before you pick the venue because each journal has different requirements for citation formatting, length, and type of sections they expect. And always email the editor your abstract and title and ask them if it fits the journal scope. This saves you time writing a full article tailored for a journal when it never even fit the scope in the first place.