colloquium /Tara McPherson

What Color Is Your Scholarship?: Vectors and New Modes of Digital Publication

This presentation will explore 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. I will examine the current state of online publication while also imagining what other forms digital scholarship might take. Taking up as a provocative illustration a new electronic offering, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Tara 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? How might scholarship look and feel differently?

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 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.

Bio

Tara McPherson is the Chair of Critical Studies and an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Studies in USC’s School of Cinema-TV, where she teaches courses in television, new media, and contemporary popular culture. Before arriving at USC, Tara taught film and media studies at MIT. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, and Screen, and edited anthologies such as Race and Cyberspace, Virtual Publics, The Visual Culture Reader 2.0, and Basketball Jones. Her award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Place and Femininity in the Deep South was recently published by Duke UP (2003), and she is co-editor of the anthology Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. She is currently co-editing two anthologies on new technology, working on a book manuscript on racial epistemologies in the electronic age, and editing a dynamic new multimedia journal, Vectors.

Co-organizer of the 1999 conference, Interactive Frictions, Tara is among the founding organizers of Race in Digital Space, a multi-year initiative supported by the Annenberg Center for Communication and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Television Academy Archives, is a core member of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), has served as an AFI Television Awards juror, and is on the board of several journals. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, race, and representation, and she is also exploring the film and multimedia work of Charles and Ray Eames.

Vectors: http://www.vectorsjournal.org
HASTAC: http://www.hastac.org
Race in Digital Space 2.0 Conference: http://www.annenberg.edu/race/
Interactive Frictions Conference: http://www.annenberg.edu/labyrinth/interactive.html