The Extended Bibliography for Counting Feminicide
This spring, I was working on revisions for my next book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action, which will be coming out from MIT Press in early 2024. I turned in my manuscript on time (pats self on back) and settled in to try to work on other projects and spend time with my family in Uruguay during sabbatical.
Yet I made a crucial mistake which I am documenting here for future authors - Especially those who love writing long, digressive footnotes and citing generously and expansively. I had been carefully monitoring my word count to make sure I hadn’t exceeded the words in my contract. The manuscript I turned in was over the word limit, but not egregiously (or so I thought). However! It turns out that Google Docs does not count footnotes as part of their word count. And I hadn’t been monitoring the length of my reference list. The bottom line was that my manuscript was 150% of the length is was supposed to be. This is to say that I had included 50,000 words in footnotes and references alone.
The manuscript was returned to me graciously by the editor, asking to please cut 50,000 words 😭😭😭.
The cutting was hard. I was sad to let go of some of my best and most digressive footnotes, though ultimately it made for a smoother read. But I think the hardest part was cutting out citations. I see a bibliography as a mini-library that acknowledges and credits and uplifts the extensive work on the subject in the past. But given that my bibliography was taking up a quarter of my contracted manuscript length, I had to let some things go. Drawing inspiration from the excellent work by CLEAR Lab on Citational politics as well as How to Cite Like a Badass Tech Feminist Scholar of Color by Rigoberto Lara Guzmán and Sareeta Amrute, I chose to prioritize uplifting works by activists and advocacy organizations, artists, junior and student scholars, women of color scholars, Black scholars, Indigenous scholars and Latin American and border studies scholars.
Nevertheless, I have decided to publish the original, extended bibliography on PubPub in the case that it is useful to future scholars, activists and others who work on the topics of feminicide, data activism, data ethics, and data science & social justice. I offer that here as the mini-library for everything that I reviewed and wanted to cite in the making of Counting Feminicide:
Counting Feminicide — Extended Bibliography
The extended bibliography links out to the works cited and specifically links to open access versions of the works, when those are available. Thanks go to Alessandra Jungs de Almeida for helping to find those links and prepare the list for publication.
And remember kids, Google Docs’ word count does NOT count footnotes…
