Another new Scalar project: The Knotted Line, a “tactile laboratory” created by artist/educator Evan Bissell that explores the nature of freedom and confinement in the United States. True to its name, The Knotted Line represents the intertwined histories of incarceration, education and labor through a collection of miniature paintings by Bissell depicting over 50 historical moments, all connected by a flowing, interactive line that can be pushed, pulled, and opened to reveal the imagery and content inside. This dynamic interface, designed and developed by Vectors’s creative director Erik Loyer, is almost wholly driven by material authored in Scalar—the first project to use Scalar in this way.

Each painting of The Knotted Line is annotated with brief glosses which introduce the historical event it depicts, and then link to an expanded treatment of the event in Scalar’s native reading interface, featuring embedded videos, images, and resources for educators. The complete timeline, which focuses on the geographical area of the United States, covers over 500 years of history, including some hopeful speculation about future events.

The Knotted Line shows the versatility of Scalar in the way in which it uses the same store of content to drive radically different, yet complementary presentations. Scalar’s ability to add arbitrary metadata using popular ontologies like Dublin Core and ArtSTOR made it possible to include the temporal and spatial coordinates needed by the tactile interface, while still keeping content visible and editable within Scalar’s default presentation.

Because of the visual, pedagogical, and historical nature of its content, The Knotted Line represents a dataset with its own creative potential for remix and reuse. To encourage this, the project’s creators have included a “Data Sources” path which explains where to find useful resources like 300 dpi versions of each painting, an XML file that defines every point of the “knotted line” itself, and more—a great example of how the open access philosophy behind Scalar enables projects to function simultaneously as publications, websites, archives, and services. As a result, the potential exists to reformat The Knotted Line as a poster, a game, or some unforeseen mashup with another data source; we’re excited by the possibilities.

We’re happy to announce that the latest Scalar publication to go live is the digital companion to Matthew Delmont’s new book The Nicest Kids in Town (University of California Press), which explores American Bandstand’s discriminatory policies against black youth in Philadelphia—contrary to the claims of host Dick Clark that he integrated the show in its early years. Delmont’s digital project features over 100 images and video clips, including memorabilia, newspaper clippings, and vintage clips from American Bandstand. The Scalar publication first began to take shape at the NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities in Summer 2011.

Delmont’s project uses Scalar’s “paths” feature to organize his material into three main sections: “Bandstand’s Local Years: 1952-1957,” “America’s Bandstand: 1957-1964,” and “Remembering American Bandstand,” each replete with media illustrations. As the screen shot above (taken from one of Scalar’s built-in visualizations) illustrates, media (shown in green) comprises roughly 3/4 of the discrete content elements in the project, and is extensively referenced (media links are represented as green arcs).

Delmont recently spoke about his research on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan González.

ANVC’s Craig Dietrich joined a group of scientists, humanists, and archivists for a weekend at the New York Public Library to discuss workflows between digital archives, linked data, and authors. At the Compatible Data Initiative conference, Dietrich presented Scalar’s use of XSLT and RDF technology to seemlessly bridge the platform with partner archives including Critical Commons and the Internet Archive. He concluded his talk with a call for publishing platforms to encourage responsible use of media through import features that maintain metadata records and templates that balance voice in both text and image.

Dietrich co-presented with UMaine Still Water co-director Jon Ippolito, who featured the Metaserver, an emerging tool for linking records across archives.

Both Scalar and the Metaserver can point to resources without needing to create a local copy, meaning they can outsource the labor of updating references to the various collections to those curators who are in a better position to do so. And both are free and open-source software. (Still Water blog)

The Vectors’ team is the core development team for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.  The ANVC seeks to enrich the intellectual potential of our fields to inform understandings of an expanding array of visual practices as they are reshaped within digital culture, while also creating scholarly contexts for the use of digital media in film, media and visual studies. By working with humanities centers, scholarly societies, and key library, archive, and university press partners, we are investigating and developing sustainable platforms for publishing interactive and rich media scholarship.

Our work explores new forms of scholarly publishing aimed at easing the current economic crisis faced by many university presses while also serving as a model for media-rich digital publication. In essence, we are creating a pipeline to support emerging genres of scholarship that moves from soup to nuts, integrating core intellectual questions in our fields with content acquisition, training for scholars in digital research methodologies, and new paradigms and partnerships for publication, dissemination and warranting of scholarship. In partnership with film and video archives, scholarly societies, and presses, we are modeling twenty-first century possibilities for scholarly communication. New technological platforms like Scalar are a key part of the process but equally important are the human networks we are building: rich collaborations between archives, presses, and groups of scholars who can together provide new platforms for scholarship that are motivated by the key questions that animate humanities scholarship.

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.”