Fellows from this summer’s Vectors-IML NEH Institute in Los Angeles speak about their collaborations and interests in an interactive media installation across the country in Maine.  Magic is presently installed at the at Without Borders VI: Conjunction gallery show on the University of Maine campus, and features video interview segments and theme-based navigation to explore the processes by which interactive media projects are produced.  Co-produced by Vectors staffer Craig Dietrich with U-Maine Intermedia graduate student John Bell, and L.A.-based installation artist Vanessa Vobis, the team created the installation as an early introduction to Magic, intending a full, Web-based release in 2010.

To see the installation on the Web, please visit http://magic.craigdietrich.com/WithoutBorders

This document describing a tool developed by the Vectors team was first released in July, 2006.  The text has been updated to reflect recent changes to the software.

Concept Overview

First launched in 2005, Vectors is an international electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. Moving well beyond the text-with-pictures format of much electronic scholarly publishing, Vectors brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, focusing on the ways technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures social and cultural relations.  Vectors’ fellows are afforded the opportunity to work closely with our design and development team in order to realize new media instantiations of their scholarly projects.  Projects published in Vectors push the interface of scholarly publishing in exciting new directions, but these “front-end” innovations are largely possible because of the database structures we have also been developing.

One of the most promising and unexpected outcomes of the Vectors project has been the emergence of the database as a critical tool for the future of scholarship, not just as a repository for information but as an intellectual instrument in its own right.  In an effort to scale the Vectors process and to make the successes of our collaborative endeavors more widely available, we have developed the Dynamic Backend Generator (DBG), an open-source middleware tool that has the potential to reconfigure scholarly endeavors in powerful new ways.  This tool functions as a kind of middleware ‘engine,’ a robust and flexible database construction kit well suited to scholarly endeavors.  Databases, of course, are nothing new, having long proved useful in their ability to separate the structure of information from its presentation, allowing that information to be organized and manipulated while still in a state of abstraction.  The uniqueness of the DBG is that it begins to harness the power of the database for next-generation scholarship in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.

Continue reading this post »

Featured in the last issue of MIT’s Leonardo magazine are guidelines designed to nudge the criteria for excellence in today’s universities into the 21st century. Originally adopted to evaluate new media faculty at the University of Maine, these criteria are released under a Creative Common license in the hopes that faculties at other universities and research institutes will take a broader view of scholarship in the digital age.

Among other recommendations, the Leonardo article argues for rewarding researchers who experiment with digital publication tools, such as ThoughtMesh, and innovative online journals, such as Vectors.

The documents are also available online, in the form of a white paper entitled “New Criteria for New Media” as well as detailed guidelines for promotion and tenure.

ThoughtMesh has begun a collaboration with Carnegie-Mellon University’s ETC Press, a publishing imprint dedicated to printing books across multiple media formats:

ETC Press publications will focus on issues revolving around entertainment technologies as they are applied across a variety of fields. We will accept submissions and publish work in a variety of media (textual, electronic, digital, etc.). We are interested in creating projects with Sophie, and all ETC Press publications will be released under…Creative Commons licenses.

The first book meshed from ETC, Stories In Between: Narratives and Mediums @ Play, is by CMU’s own Drew Davidson. Stories In Between considers the interplay of word and medium in recent mixed-medium texts such as Myst, the Sandman comic series, Ultima OnLine, and MitterNachtSpiel.