Abstract
After offering a typology of the digital humanities, this presentation will explore several aspects of the international electronic journal, Vectors: its conception, its mandates, its infrastructure, and its innovative collaborative design process. Some questions to be considered include: What happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring different modes of engagement from the reader/user? How does "argument" shift when scholarship goes fully networked, visual and multimedia? How do you "experience" argument in a more immersive and sensory-rich space? Can scholarship show as well as tell? What do humanities scholars gain from working with database structures and technologists? What kind of new partnerships will be required among libraries, designers, publishers, and scholars to foster new outcomes and new audiences for scholarship?
About Tara McPherson
Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Gender and Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture, among other awards. She is co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and edited anthologies. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, www.vectorsjournal.org, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal, and was recently selected as one of three editors for the new MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (forthcoming from MIT Press in 2009. Tara was among the founding organizers of Race in Digital Space, a multi-year project supported by the Annenberg Center for Communication and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Archives, has frequently served as an AFI juror, is a core board member of HASTAC, and is on the boards of several journals. With support from the Mellon Foundation, she is currently working with colleagues from Brown, NYU, Rochester, and UC San Diego to explore the feasibility of a digital hub for visual culture research.