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• 1 2015-08-16T15:19:39-07:00 Origins of Vectors 13 plain 2015-11-14T22:29:26-08:00 The late 1990s witnessed numerous developments in electronic publishing, including the founding of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) in 1999 and the inaugural meeting of the New London Group in 1996, giving rise to a model of semiotics-informed pedagogy focusing on recognition and support for “multiliteracies” (Cope, 2000). The electronic journal Kairos also launched in 1996, devoted to exploring the scholarly potentials of hypertextual writing (“webtexts”) for research and pedagogy in composition and rhetoric. Related pedagogical experiments in technology-enhanced teaching and learning were taking place at USC under the auspices of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) beginning in 1998. It was within this particularly dynamic historical and institutional milieu that the journal Vectors was conceived and ultimately launched in 2005. The goal of the journal was to extend the IML’s experiments with faculty multimedia authoring into the emerging space of peer-reviewed electronic publication. Vectors sought to model new modes of digital scholarship that would simultaneously prove the concept of rigorous, credentialed scholarship coupled with design-centric experiments with user experience.
   
  The formal aspirations and workflow of Vectors were also inspired by Marsha Kinder’s Labyrinth Project, which had been in production at USC since 1997. At the time of Vectors’ conception, Labyrinth had recently made the transition from producing CD ROMs to DVD ROMs, which allowed creation of richly mediated, interactive experiences using high-resolution, full motion video. Working in collaboration with artists who had not previously engaged in digital production, Labyrinth's designers experimented widely with multimedia interfaces. Early examples include Jim Tobias’ gestural interface created for Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy (2000), which required users to scrub the cursor kinetically across the surface of the interface, and numerous experiments with randomization and serendipity by designers Rosemary Comella and Kristy Kang. Standing in stark contrast to Pat O’Neill’s fluid, motion-controlled camera movements through the halls of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel seen in Tracing the Decay of Fiction (2002), for example, a user would experience periodic "earthquakes" that rumbled through the interface, propelling visitors into random, unexplored sections of the project.
   
  Vectors may therefore be understood as staking out a middle ground between the hypertextual experiments of the ELO and the design studio model of Labyrinth, which verged on fine art. Though equally invested in experiments with dynamic interfaces and database structures, Vectors remained oriented toward scholarly publishing and open access, online distribution. Due to the still daunting constraints of early broadband-era internet, most Vectors projects used Adobe Flash as their primary design and development platform. Unfortunately, the name “Flash” was not received well in many scholarly contexts of the mid-2000s, where it seemed to lend credence to suspicions among critics of digital scholarship that style or “flash” was taking precedence over substance. On a technical level, Flash posed an additional problem for scholars who wanted their work to be indexable and citable at the level of pages or paragraphs. Although it ran on the internet’s most widely installed media player, Flash continued to generate files that appeared as a black box to search engines and academic indices alike. While the first generation of Vectors projects accepted this limitation, hosting media files in local directories, project workflow quickly shifted to incorporate external – and therefore indexable – databases for which Flash continued to provide a highly customizable user experience.
   
  The production of each in-house Vectors project resulted from pairing a contributing scholar with a designer/programmer, who collaborated under the guidance of a journal editor to develop a project over the course of 4-6 months. Readers who are interested in a meticulous and insightful account of Vectors’ editorial and production process should consult Founding Editor Tara McPherson’s article, “Scaling Vectors: Thoughts on the Future of Scholarly Communication,” which appeared in the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) in 2010 (McPherson, 2010). The thoroughness of her account obviates the need to recapitulate the journal’s history, but I will quote from McPherson’s observation about the experience of Vectors contributors:

  They find themselves chafing against the constraints of linear text. They sense other possibilities that arise almost organically from the materials they study. They have begun to realize that they are interested in something beyond illustration. That is, it is not simply that their press would only allow 30 images in the hard copy book, and they have 75 on hand. Rather, they come to understand that the visual (or aural) communicate differently. Working more organically with these forms allows them both to present their argument differently and understand their materials differently. They can filter materials in new ways to structure multiple lines of argument or experience.

  In the same issue of JEP, Patrick Svensson offered a point-by-point comparison of the format of Vectors with that of Digital Humanities Quarterly, highlighting the ways Vectors projects deliberately departed from design conventions emerging in digital scholarship during the mid-2000s (Svensson, 2010). Although the revitalization of academic publishing suggested by this issue of JEP did not flow automatically from such experiments, Vectors continues to be cited as a limit case that pushed the boundaries of scholarly electronic publishing (Fitzpatrick, 2011; Hayles, 2012). At its peak, the journal published two issues per year with at least four original projects in each issue. While individual projects were rooted in an eclectic array of disciplines and methodologies, they were united by overarching issue themes such as Evidence, Mobility, Ephemera, Perception, Difference, and Memory.