Tara McPherson
Editor, Vectors
University of Southern California
This workshop is designed to foment discussion about the future of publishing in electronic formats. While several journals have gone virtual in the past decade, very few have moved beyond the ‘text with pictures’ style of traditional print publishing. This workshop will explore the current state of online publication while also imagining what other forms digital scholarship might take. Taking up as a provocative illustration of a new electronic offering, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, the editor will demonstrate how scholarship about technology and culture might also utilize new technological forms of authorship to produce different modes of academic work and potentially reach new audiences. How might emergent digital forms transform aspects of scholarly production? This session aims to foster such conversations while demonstrating one new approach to electronic publishing.
Vectors is a new, international, electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. Vectors facilitates new modes of research, artistic creation and cultural investigation that analyze and redirect the role of the technology in an information-driven society. Vectors brings together visionary thinkers with cutting-edge designers and media artists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content, focusing on the ways technology shapes, transforms or reconfigures social and cultural relations. While not a journal solely about new media, Vectors mobilizes emerging technologies for the productive convergence of new ideas, forms and audiences in a global context. We are particularly interested in work that re-imagines the role of the user and seeks to reach broader publics while creatively exploring the value of collaboration and interactivity.
This session will explore several aspects of Vectors: its conception, its mandates, its infrastructure and funding, its attempts at community building, and its innovative collaborative design process.