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• 1 2015-08-16T15:36:10-07:00 Digital and social engagement 21 plain 2015-11-14T23:10:44-08:00 After more than a year of project development and publishing, Vectors began a shift of focus from the “front end” domain of interface design toward “backend” issues and information architecture – a transition that culminated in the Scalar project several years later. In 2006 a key component of this shift was the development of a middleware tool known as the Dynamic Backend Generator (DBG). Created by Vectors’ information design director Craig Dietrich, the DBG aimed to make it easy enough for scholars with no technical expertise to effectively structure and populate their own project databases. Typically, adding materials to a database is understood to be among the most tedious and least creative stages in the design of a multimedia project, and it is often left to others to perform. The result is that the project database remains opaque to the scholar and s/he is rendered dependent on others. However, once familiarized with the DBG, scholars were empowered to control the contents of the database rather than focusing their attention exclusively on strategies for display and interaction.
  
  This was the core of the Vectors experiment: to empower humanists to dig below the surface of the interface to engage deeper levels of digital authoring and to thereby invite them to ask different kinds of questions of their discipline and objects of study. The Vectors interactive editorial statement, designed and programmed by Raegan Kelly, expands upon this sentiment of defamiliarization, while modeling an insistence on interactive engagement through the collaboration of authors, designers, readers, and computational processes. The brief texts (“lexia”) that comprised the editorial statement were co-authored by the editors in an attempt to model the journal's commitment to a triangulated process of writing, reading, and computation. Visitors to the "statement" are first required to type in a keyword in order to call forth relevant lexia, along with related keyword arrays. Concurrently, a code window reveals the Actionscript used to generate the text and its linkages. A sample of the text generated in response to the keyword “labor” is as follows:

  Input via index: “labor” transmitted to host
  key= process
  secondary_key_array= author,labor,play,collaboration
  associative_array= labor,play,tool,open source,translation,time
  
  lexia= Like the media products that preceded them, digital forms tend to conceal the labor that was necessary to produce them.  The slickness of the digital can make it hard to remember the varied acts of labor that underwrite the ubiquitous technologies of the Western world, rendering invisible code workers and chip makers alike.  Vectors insists that labor matters and that a careful investigation of networked society can reveal and perhaps forestall our seamless incorporation into the uneven workings of post-fordist digital capitalism.

  
  Admittedly, these texts and associated keywords were composed before Vectors had published its first issue. They are therefore reflective more of the hopes that were invested in the journal, the ethical stakes and commitments that motivated the form of the projects, and the processes of collaboration that sought to place design considerations on an equal footing with more traditional “content.”
   
  The Vectors selection process was disposed to favor work that engaged social issues, especially related to feminism, critical race theory, and cultural or ethnic studies. In part, this represented an effort to remediate the discourse of disembodiment and dematerialization of early net culture and the apolitical turn in humanities computing of the preceding decades. It was also an extension of McPherson’s work as a co-founder of the Race in Digital Space conferences that took place at MIT (2001) and USC (2002), which were explicitly devoted to foregrounding issues of race and ethnicity in digital culture. It was an explicit commitment of the Vectors editorial project – and later in the development of Scalar – that these platforms represented an opportunity to promote digital publishing as a space of inclusivity toward historically underrepresented groups. Citing Sharon Daniel's Vectors project, “Public Secrets,” Patrick Svensson notes, “There is a strong sense of intervention here that resonates with the "active" humanities…Daniel’s "Public Secrets" brings together artistic installation and academic expression in a single frame that serves both as cultural critique and activist call for change” (Svensson, 2010). A review of the Vectors archive reveals the extent to which these goals were evident in the selection of projects; however, a more challenging question is the extent to which the design function of the journal itself succeeds in challenging the “uneven workings of post-fordist digital capitalism.”