As they began planning the journal’s structure, the Editorial Board determined that the success of a new model for digital publication would require two major accomplishments. First, the model would need to resolve several major barriers to adoption of the digital framework for scholarly work, including publishing its contents in a permanently citable location. Second, it would need to promote a fusion of multimedia elements, including interactive maps, images, sound and video files, and data sets, into the scholarly productions such that these became integral parts of the publication, not mere auxiliary materials.

At its inaugural meeting in 2004, the Editorial Board established several important policies and procedures for the journal. With regard to barriers to adoption, they carefully approached four key issues: copyright, citation, version control, and cataloging. They created a copyright statement that favored the rights of the author, granting only first publication rights to the forum. By providing authors with explicit rights to republish their materials elsewhere, the Board sought to embody the principles of “open access” and “open content” publications. This is unusual within scholarly publishing, as most publishers claim that the ownership of published material resides with the publisher, not the author. Further, this move anticipated the conundrum of tenure review that has plagued digital publications. As most tenure review boards do not yet consider digital publications — even peer-reviewed journal articles — in the same light as peer-reviewed print scholarship, many scholars are unwilling to risk publishing in this medium. By providing scholars with the right to republish their materials elsewhere, the Editorial Board hoped to allay the fears of this significant community of tenure-seeking academics.

The Editorial Board likewise addressed the barrier of citation. Scholars and independent researchers have reported their reluctance to cite Internet-based resources due to the ephemeral nature of these resources. Many digitally published websites change their content at-will without alerting readers of the changes, move locations or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) repeatedly, and a large number of sites disappear altogether without warning. As a result, citing web pages often yields frustration, both for authors and readers of their work. The cited content may change after a scholar has cited it; it may move to a different location; or it may vanish altogether, leaving the author and her/his readers in unverifiable terrain. The Board elicited the support of the Robert. W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, the website’s host, to provide stable URLs for the site’s content. All Southern Spaces publications are given a standard URL that encodes key information about the piece, including the author’s name and the publication year. These URLs do not change; nor does the content listed at each page. The Library has made a commitment to maintaining this content in its current locations ad infinitum . Information regarding this policy is relayed to the reader through the website on a “Cite This Page” link that appears on every publication page.

This citation policy relates to a third issue addressed by the Editorial Board in 2004: that of version control. In the print medium, it is not possible to make changes to a publication unless the publisher is willing to print a new edition. As such, authors cannot add to, subtract from, or even correct typos from their work after it appears — not because doing so is undesirable, but because it is too costly. One of the chief benefits of publishing within the digital medium is that the cost of changing a word, a link, an image, or any other component of a site is negligible. If an author comes across new information relevant to a previous web-based publication, s/he can even add this information to the existing piece, and in doing so, enrich its scholarly value.

The Editorial Board wanted to capitalize on this feature of digital publishing, but wanted to do so in such a way that every change is transparent to the reader, and every version of a piece is accessible through its original citation (or URL). The Board thus established procedures for amendments to published works, and determined that such amendments could not be made to the original piece, but would instead be made within a new version of that piece. The original piece remains at its published URL — no changes can be made to that piece in order to ensure that the content matches any citation a reader may include in her/his own work. New versions are given clearly identifiable URLs that connect it to the original publication without replacing it. Likewise, every publication that contains versions also contains a version-management page that links to every published version of the piece, and that provides a “tracked-changes” option to enable readers to quickly identify what changes were made between each version. This maintains both the permanence of content expected by researchers and the flexibility of the medium for published authors.

Finally, the Board broached the issue of cataloging published essays, gateways, and other Southern Spaces formats. Libraries have long cataloged scholarly journals; however, they have done so by issue, not by individual publication. The convention of issue-based publication was constructed in order to allow newspapers, magazines, journals and other periodicals to publish batches of works at particular temporal moments — a cost-saving mechanism in the print medium. Such a convention does not naturally apply to the digital medium, where publication can occur on a rolling basis without incurring additional cost. Given that another strength of the digital medium is the relatively quick turn-around time from submission to publication, releasing pieces on a rolling basis is a highly desirable quality for a Web-based journal. Southern Spaces adopted a policy of publishing content on a rolling basis, but needed a way to catalog contents to make them more visible through library catalogs and other indices of published works. The Editorial Board charged the Managing Editor and Editorial Associates with resolving this issue.

Working in tandem with the Woodruff Library’s Technology and Metadata Librarian, the Managing Editor and Editorial Staff created a cataloging format based on a current library standard, MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema), to catalog the journal’s contents at the publication level. Each essay, gateway, interview, performance, and presentation published in Southern Spaces is provided with a full catalog record. This record is stored in the code of the lead html-encoded page of the published piece and is submitted to relevant indices, including Emory University’s library catalog.

With these important policies and procedures established, the Editorial Board next concentrated on the critical feature that distinguished Southern Spaces from other digital journals — its focus on publishing works that cannot be published in print. The Board wrote a call for submissions and submission guidelines that explicitly sought scholarship that fully integrated text and multimedia elements. The Board and staff have worked collaboratively with authors since the release of that call in order to fulfill this mission.

Despite accounting for publication rights, preservation, cataloguing and version control, a prospective author’s multimedia literacy and technological comfort level still significantly impacts his or her decision to publish in a born-digital journal. Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, housed at University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, resolved this issue by both soliciting completed multimedia works and commissioning projects produced through a collaboration between scholars, tech-savvy designers and the Vectors creative team. While Southern Spaces staff (which includes a videographer, web designer and copy editors) work with authors during publication process, accepted submissions generally come in a digital format, complete with some multimedia components and references. This is not to say, however, that all authors published on Southern Spaces possess a high comfort level with emergent technology. In fact, most authors publishing in the journal have not previously published a multi-media piece...

In recent months, Southern Spaces has been used in a variety of classrooms from an undergraduate U.S. Southern History course at University of Nebraska to an introductory telecommunication policy class at Michigan State University to an Emerging Media course in the Moving Image Studies Program at Georgia State University. In most instances, the content of the Southern Spaces article rather than the format the article was delivered in remained the chief reason for assigning Southern Spaces texts as reading material. However, poet and professor Natasha Trethewey recently screened Tuscaloosa: Riversong, a video poem published in 2005 on Southern Spaces, for her undergraduate creative writing class at Duke University. Using the poem itself as well as the online format for poetic delivery, Prof. Trethewey offered students the option of videotaping their own work for a final project. Many of her students took this opportunity learning not only the potentially performative aspect of in creative writing, but also gaining some technical knowledge often not associated with a traditional creative writing course.

Southern Spaces’ dynamic use of the medium to present a more innovative lecture offers one significant reason for either bringing web resources into the classroom or bringing the online classroom into the private residence. Through book and poetry readings, conference presentations and musical performances, Southern Spaces not only offers online lectures and primary resources, but does so by also integrating text and web-based sources into one online freely-accessible space. Rather than offering something akin to an instructor podcast or taped lecture, Southern Spaces pieces go beyond the podium and the video camera by adding supplementary materials such as field footage, maps and outside data. Mary Odem’s lecture “Global Lives, Local Struggles: Latin American Immigrants in Atlanta,” was built from a conference presentation as she and a Southern Spaces videographer crafted a piece featuring documentary footage as well as visual data difficult to present on an overhead projector (let alone a video of an overhead projector). Similarly, acclaimed author Darnell Arnoult’s “Work” offers a short film of the author reading her poem in the site that inspired her to write the piece. On-site tapings and the inclusion of field footage and other primary materials add to a dynamic content portal that gives learners the opportunity to view lectures from anywhere with an internet connection, and they provide valuable secondary material in a style impossible to replicate live in the classroom environment.

As an internet-based interdisciplinary journal, Southern Spaces combines subject matter covering fields of inquiry over a host of media and formats. Although the journal focuses on spatiality and the American South, the Editorial Board and staff endeavor to bring content applicable to courses focusing on American Literature and History, as well as Arts, Music, Media Studies, Economics, Environmental Studies, Social Policy, Education, Religion, Race and Ethnicity Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Government Policy, Leisure Studies and Geography. With nearly sixty pieces published since 2004 and nearly twenty pieces in progress, Southern Spaces presents multiple fields of humanistic inquiry through new media applications.

The previous section examined how Southern Spaces has been and could be used in humanities classrooms in the United States, however a chief endeavor for the journal in the coming two years remains the relationships between the U.S. South and other parts of the world. Currently, Southern Spaces provides a few pieces that deal with immigration policy and the importance of looking at the Global South (see “The U.S. South in Global Contexts”, “Global Lives, Local Struggles: Latin American Immigrants in Atlanta” and “Whatwuzit? The 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics Reconsidered”); however, the concept of multiple souths in multiple regions and their respective identities and uses needs to be further addressed. In Dialogues, Gilles Deleuze states that “everyone has his south,” regardless of physical location. In turn, these souths, real and imagined, remain loosely related through adopted ideologies, tropes and identities. The soccer fans of Cork and Naples use the U.S. Confederate flag, to identify themselves as “outsiders” and “rebels” within a larger region that they both self-identify with but also set themselves in contrast to, just as some Americans still use Confederate flag to signify a rebelliousness to a perceived national identity and/or a historical, regional (and sometimes racially-biased) solidarity. These global southern spaces, along with those engaging in and with them, and their comparative relations along racial lines and regional boundaries remain important topics of discussion, suitable for an online space that already transcends numerous boundaries based on its format. In identifying issues of social justice, history, cultural, ethnic and regional identity beyond the eleven states that constituted the Confederate States of America, Southern Spaces seeks to bring issues in American Southern history and culture into a broader global context through the examination of relationships between American Studies and studies of South Africa, Spain, England, Italy, France and beyond.