Animating the Archive: Emerging Forms of Scholarly Publishing

Animating the Archive: Emerging Forms of Scholarly Publishing

Tara McPherson (USC, School of Cinematic Arts)
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 / 3:30 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In a belated recognition of Open Access Week (October 24-30), Tara McPherson, strong  advocate and practitioner of open access publishing and explorer of innovative interdisciplinary digital scholarship, will share her ideas about the future of scholarly communication, interdisciplinarity, new model publishing initiatives, and the principles behind the peer-reviewed  open access journal Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (www.vectorsjournal.org), of which she is the founding editor.

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Gender and Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and co-director of USC’s Center for Transformative Scholarship. She also serves as the Faculty Chair for USC’s Provost Initiative in the Arts and Humanities. Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture, among other awards. She is co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, and Screen, and in edited anthologies such as Race and Cyberspace, The New Media Book, The Object Reader, Virtual Publics, The Visual Culture Reader 2.0, and Basketball Jones. The anthology, Interactive Frictions, co-edited with Marsha Kinder, is forthcoming from the University of California Press, and she is currently working on a manuscript on the cultural and racial logics of code. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, www.vectorsjournal.org, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press, and is one of three editors for the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (launched by MIT Press in 2009.) Each of these efforts supports emerging electronic scholarship that pushes far beyond the boundaries of the printed page. Her expertise in digital publishing is widely sought out, and she has presented her work and participated in working groups and task forces for the MacArthur Foundation, SCI, CLIR, CNI, NSF, and the NEH, among others. She is on the advisory board of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communications Institute, is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Archives, has frequently been an AFI juror, and is a founding board member of HASTAC www.hastac.org. She serves as a managing editor for American Quarterly and is on the boards of several journals. With support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, she is currently working with colleagues from Brown, NYU, Rochester, and UC San Diego and with several academic presses and archives to explore new modes of scholarship for visual culture research. Tara was among the founding organizers of Race in Digital Space, a multi-year project supported by the Annenberg Center for Communication and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She continues the efforts begun during these events through an ongoing partnership with local public schools in Los Angeles. She is currently working with the Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts to integrate digital platforms for learning into a constructivist, hands-on curriculum.

Sponsored by Davidson Library and the IHC’s Public Goods series.