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.

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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.”