Vectors
The journal's founding Editor Tara McPherson and Associate editor Steve Anderson launched Vectors at USC in 2005 as an experiment in modeling a design-centric mode of digital scholarship, which was still a rarity in the evolution of electronic publishing at that time. The journal followed traditional conventions of (open) peer-review, but was welcoming to innovative modes of design and interactivity for users/readers. The production of each project developed by Vectors emerged from pairing a contributing scholar with a designer/programmer and an editor/project producer who collaborated to develop each project over the course of 4-6 months. Each project was first conceptualized through a summer planning workshop that included the entire Vectors design and editorial team as well as scholars selected to contribute to the two themed issues being produced in a given year.
TK: McPherson has published a meticulous account of the Vectors editorial and production process in the Journal of Electronic Publishing in 2010.
[Tara McPherson, "Scaling Vectors: Thoughts on the Future of Scholarly Communication" in Journal of Electronic Publishing Volume 13, Issue 2: Reimagining the University Press (Fall 2010).]
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.
See also Patrick Svensson's comparison of the format of Vectors with that of Digital Humanities Quarterly, for an account of the ways Vectors deliberately departed from design conventions emerging in digital scholarship during the mid-2010s.
[Patrick Svensson, "The Landscape of Digital Humanities" in Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol. 4 No. 1 (2010)]
Where McPherson and Svensson focus on publishing workflow and the impact of electronic publishing on academic presses and the potential to transform the vitality of the industry, the focus of this article is on the experience of journal *authors* working in collaboration with a design-programming team and the transformation of expressive potentials through new forms of writing.
The result was that each issue of the journal featured a small number of exquisitely designed and researched projects rooted in a variety of fields and and methodologies, but united by an overarching issue theme. At its peak of production, the journal published two issues per year with at least four original projects in each issue. Vectors was inspired by and modeled after Marsha Kinder’s Labyrinth Project, which had been in production at USC for several years prior to the launch of Vectors. At the time of Vectors’ conception, Labyrinth had recently made the transition from producing CD ROMs to DVD ROMs, which allowed them to create richly mediated, interactive experiences using high-resolution, full motion video.
TK: also cite Labyrinth's early experiments with gestural interface [Mysteries and desire : searching the worlds of John Rechy (2000)] and randomization as navigational strategy via video-enabled DVD ROM media [Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O'Neill (2002) in which periodic "earthquakes" rumble through the project interface, propelling visitors into a randomly selected section of the building/project].
Vectors, in contrast, was entirely committed to online delivery in spite of the still daunting constraints of bandwidth and access afforded by an early "broadband"-era internet. While many online journals at the time consisted primarily of text with pictures or - as they are today – PDFs delivered online, Vectors aimed to be more insistently interactive, taking advantage of the affordances of Adobe Flash as its primary development platform.
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- Critical Interfaces Steve Anderson
