Coinciding with a HASTAC Scholars Forum taking place this week on the same topic, Vectors is pleased to publish the proceedings of the Critical Code Studies 2010 Conference. The vibrant collection of videos and articles is published using ThoughtMesh, a platform and 2005 Vectors commission that links documents via user-generated tags and meshes.

The conference featured keynote speaker Wendy Chun and a host of prominent scholars, many of whom are present in this conversation. For those who’ve hesitated to join this discussion for lack of familiarity with CCS, these proceedings, featuring text and videos, are the perfect way to get acquainted with the innovative work that laid the foundation for our conversation. (Max Feinstein, HASTAC Scholars Forum)

Proceedings are available at: http://vectorsjournal.org/thoughtmesh/critcode
Critical Code Studies: http://criticalcodestudies.com

We’re excited to announce the CFP for our upcoming Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies.

“The Institute will offer scholars the opportunity to explore the benefits of interactive media for scholarly analysis and authorship, illustrating the possibilities of multimodal media for humanities investigation within the context of American Studies.”

For more information, please visit our submissions page.

Update: the CFP has been extended to February 15th, 2011. More information at from USC’s Center for Transformative Scholarship: Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on the Digital Approaches to American Studies.

We’re excited to relay the launch of Precision Targets, a sequel to Caren Kaplans’s 2007 Vectors commission Dead Reckoning.  In Precision Targets, Kaplan teams with Vectors Creative Director Erik Loyer and illustrator Ezra Claytan Daniels to extend research into birds-eye views and targets. Constructing an innovative 3-dimensional sequential art immersive space, the project juxtaposes GPS use by the military,  law enforcement and general public.

For more information, please visit http://precisiontargets.com

Forging the Future, an alliance of museums, archives, and other organizations devoted to new strategies and tools for preserving new media, has just launched its own Mesh–a set of documents linked by ThoughtMesh software–on the topic of variable media and preservation. In addition to standalone documents, the Mesh includes seventeen essays from the book Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, making this acclaimed publication accessible to even more readers, and automatically linking it to other texts on preservation published across the Web.

A co-publication of the Langlois Foundation and Guggenheim Museum, Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach is one of the first comprehensive books on the challenge of preserving artworks produced in the wide variety of media birthed in the last half-century. The book features a variety of perspectives, from former Guggenheim curator John Hanhart to emulation expert Jeff Rothenberg to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, as well as case studies involving Web sites, film performances, and candy spills.

Permanence Through Change also introduced many artists and arts professionals to the variable media paradigm. Now all the contributions to Permanence Through Change have been republished in a richly connective way. Because they are part of a Mesh, Permanence Through Change can be navigated via keywords that relate each essay to others in the same volume or outside on the Web at large.

We are pleased to announce the call for proposals to this summer’s Vectors-IML/UC-HRI Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship Summer 2010 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, taking place July 19-August 12, 2010. Priority will be given to applications received by March 24, 2010. For more information, please see the full CFP document on our submissions page.

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

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.

ThoughtMesh co-developers Craig Dietrich and John Bell have just launched a commenting system internal to the ThoughtMesh network with the provocative heading of “peer review.” Unlike the relatively uncontrolled comments at a site like YouTube, ThoughtMesh’s reviews are subject to a rigorous trust metric. Each reviewer must claim a level of expertise before rating an article, and the software holds them accountable in a way that differs from the traditional peer review of academic journals.

As might be expected, a review by someone claiming expertise will have more effect on the overall rating of the essay than by someone who claims none. However, those who claim expertise have to live up to it. If an academic makes exaggerated claims and is then trashed by her peers, her credibility will plummet faster than if she claimed no expertise in the first place.

The University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy and the electronic journal Vectors are pleased to announce a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship Program for summer 2009 designed to foster innovative multimedia research. Titled “Broadening the Digital Humanities,” the Institute will offer scholars the opportunity to explore the benefits of interactive media for scholarly analysis and authorship, illustrating the possibilities of multimodal media for humanities investigation. Fellows participating in the program will learn both by engaging with a variety of existing projects as well as through the production of their own project in collaboration with the Vectors-IML team. The projects fellows create will at once enrich their own understanding of the digital humanities and model the field for other scholars. Select projects will be published in Vectors.

For more information, please visit our submissions page.

Still Water’s John Bell and Jon Ippolito presented the Vectors project ThoughtMesh, co-produced with Craig Dietrich, in a talk given at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University last July. The topic was new tools for sharing the products of creative and academic research.

The Berkman Web site includes a video of the presentation as well as a text-based q&a with Bell and Ippolito on “crowdsourcing creativity.”

Over forty authors from the National Poetry Foundation’s conference on poetry of the seventies have published their work using ThoughtMesh, revealing connections among different peoples’ writing. Now poets and poetry scholars at other universities appear to be jumping on the bandwagon. Who knew that “1973″ and “John Ashbery” were on so many poets’ minds? ThoughtMesh did.

For more information please visit:
http://newmedia.umaine.edu/feature.php?id=905

An article in the March 30th Chronicle of Higher Education featured three projects developed at The University of Maine’s New Media Department including ThoughtMesh, created withVectors. Andrea Foster writes, “ThoughtMesh is a Web site that tags open-access scholarly papers with key words. Visitors can jump to passages in papers that contain those words. And they can see others’ papers, throughout academe, tagged with the same words. A “cloud” of tagged words hovers above each paper.”

For more information please visit:
New-Media Scholars’ Place in ‘the Pool’ Could Lead to Tenure
ThoughtMesh Vectors Project Page
University of Maine New Media Department

“Blue Velvet,” by David Theo Goldberg, Stefka Hristova, and Erik Loyer, will be featured in the Media Art Show at this year’s Electronic Literature Organization conference in Vancouver, Washington. Featured in the Difference issue of Vectors, ”Blue Velvet” enables users to submerge themselves in a poetic wordscape describing the contours of American racial politics post-Katrina.

For more information please visit:
ELO Conference website

Public Secrets, by Sharon Daniels and Erik Loyer, has been named an official selection at transmediale 08 in Berlin. The piece, included in the Vectors’ Perception issue, explores issues of women’s incarceration. 

As a festival for art and digital culture, transmediale presents advanced artistic positions reflecting on the socio-cultural impact of new technologies. It seeks out artistic practices that not only respond to scientific or technical developments, but that try to shape the way in which we think about and experience these technologies. transmediale understands media technologies as cultural techniques which need to be embraced in order to comprehend, critique, and shape our contemporary society.

For more information please visit:
transmediale site

Vectors’ fellow Kim Christen was recently interviewed on the BBC’s Digital Planet about her continued work developing innovative archives with indigenous peoples. 

Kim’s Vectors’ project, “Digital Dynamics Across Cultures” (in the Ephemera issue), was an early effort in this regard. She has gone on to receive numerous grants and to continue to work with Vectors’  team member, Craig Deitrich.

For more information please visit:
Learn more at Kim’s blog

Congratulations to Vectors Fellow Sharon Daniel and Co-Creative Director, Erik Loyer!

Vectors has received a Webby Honoree Award in the Activism category for their piece, “Public Secrets”. The piece, a sophisticated and powerful exploration of the incarceration of women in California, is part of the latest issue of Vectors on the theme of “Perception” and was created as part of the Vectors Fellowship Competition. 

The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to work that scores in the top 15% of all work entered into the Webby Awards. With over 8,000 entries received from all 50 states and over 60 countries, this is an outstanding accomplishment for Sharon and Erik.

For more information please visit:
See the Webby Awards here.

Vectors has been selected for inclusion in The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. FLEFF is a one week multimedia interarts extravaganza that reboots the environment and sustainability into a larger global conversation, embracing issues ranging from labor, war, health, disease, music, intellectual property, fine art, software, remix culture, economics, archives, AIDS, women’s rights and human rights.

Cast-offs from the Golden Age, a project from Vectors’ Ephemera issue, will be featured on the Electrofringe website as part of the This Is Not Art Festival in Newcastle, Australia (September 28-October 2). Electrofringe is “dedicated to showcasing emergent forms, highlighting nascent trends and encouraging participants to explore technology and its creative possibilities.” Cast-offs, authored by Melanie Swalwell with design and programming by Erik Loyer, enables users to explore the history of New Zealand’s videogame industry in a navigable 3D environment.

As part of a recent update to the VectorSpace, Vectors’ own “intellectual paint program,” users can now search and browse for projects from any issue of Vectors and paint with them all in the same space. Information visualizers such as “Intersections” and “Keyword Flow” can now be used to visually explore the metadata for projects across issues. Previously users could only explore projects from one issue at a time.

To try out the new functionality, head to the VectorSpace and click “Get More Projects.”

coolstop selected Vectors as its pick of the day for 2/15/06. Online since October, 1997, coolstop’s mission is to provide fresh pointers to the non-commercial, creative side of the web. With an eye out for honest personal expression, excellence in web design, and original creative content, coolstop recognizes another great site every day. Enjoy!

Vectors was also featured on Rhizome and on ReBlog, the Eyebeam blog, in February.

Fro more information please visit the coolspot review..

Keynote Speaker John Seely Brown featured Vectors as a robust example of scholarship in the digital age at the 10th Annual Teaching with Technology Conference at the University of Colorado in August. Dr. Brown’s keynote was entitled, “Rethinking Education in (and for) the Digital Age.”

Kate Hayles‘ Narrating Bits is a featured project on the Information Aesthetics site for June 1, 2005.

To see the archive, please visit http://infosthetics.com/archives/2005/06/narrating_bits.html

Vectors is seeking proposals for creative or scholarly uses of a mobile server/transmitter unit known as the WiFi Bedouin for inclusion in its Mobility Issue to be published in late Summer 2005. Designed by Julian Bleecker, the WiFi Bedouin uses a portable 500mW 802.11b transmitter and Mac OS X based web server that is ready to receive your portable web content.

The system includes basic software for web pages, group chat, an open blog and iTunes music streaming, but users are free to add custom software as desired. We are particularly interested in projects that use the Bedouin to investigate issues related to the intersection of physical and virtual spaces and questions of locality, proximity, materiality, community, etc. Once your project or event has been completed, we will ask you to submit documentation of the project outcomes for inclusion in the Mobility issue of Vectors.

Please submit your WiFi Bedouin proposals to usc.vectors@gmail.com by May 25, 2005. Projects should be able to be completed and documentation submitted by July 1, 2005.

Proposals should include the following information:
• Name of applicant(s) and contact information
• Project title
• One sentence description
• Brief explanation of project goals and interests
• Approximate timeline for completing the project
• Previous work or experience in related areas

Join us at MoCA for the launch of Vectors. The evening will include a roundtable discussion of publication in the digital age, featuring the Vectors’ creative team, editors, and authors, highlighting work by Erik Loyer, Raegan Kelly, N. Katherine Hayles, Alice Gambrell and others. A reception will follow, complete with music and participatory mobile media performances.

Where: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA)
When: 7 - 10 p.m., Thursday, March 3, 2005
Admission: Free and open to all.

An article in the February 25th Research and Books Section of The Chronicle of Higher Education introduced readers to the Vectors initiative.  In a piece entitled “Hot Type: An Online Journal of Culture and Technology Begins”, Peter Monaghan describes the journal’s goals and also highlights forthcoming projects in Issues One and Two.