Sarah Toton is a PhD Candidate in the Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. She is also the managing editor of the online journal
Stacey Martin has an MA in Geography and an MS in Animal Science. She is a Strategist for Library and GIS Technologies at Emory University.
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
This paper examines the internet journal
An internet journal of the South
Gilles Deleuze,The great ruptures, the great oppositions, are always negotiable, but not the little crack, the imperceptible ruptures which come from the south. We say
southwithout attaching any importance to this... but everyone has his south — it doesn’t matter where it is — that is, his line of slope or flight.
On the surface, it is not immediately apparent that that there is a correlation between digital learning communities, U.S. Southern Studies, and major league soccer. However, the 2006 World Cup highlighted the emergent relationship and subsequent online discussion regarding traditional icongraphy of the U.S. South and its contemporary global applications. In June 2006, thousands of soccer fans gathered in Germany to watch national teams compete for the FIFA World Cup. Dressed in team colors and waiving national, regional and team flags, these lively spectators made for almost as much discussion on blogs and message boards as the teams they supported. The Confederate Navy Jack (also known as the rebel
flag) was apparently observed by some television viewers, waving from the Spanish stands at the Spain v. Tunisia match. American and European fans exchanged theories suggesting perhaps they had mistaken the Basque Flag for the Confederate flag, or that those waiving the Confederate colors were supporters of the rebel
and southern
teams such as
While icons of the U.S. South appear at soccer matches across Europe, new technologies enter classrooms and living rooms across the world. Learners of varying interests and levels can now search online for information on everything from World Cup soccer to the Confederate flag, and at message boards like those run by the American-based History Channel (a channel marketed towards life-long learners that uses the slogan where history lives
) participants can discuss both topics with other interested parties throughout the world.
Although this ready access to individuals and content thousands of miles away presents a unique opportunity for today’s students, it also offers a host of new online issues that teachers and researchers must take into consideration. For example, in many cases the content itself can become confusing as users attempt to sort through sites determining what is reputable and what is electronic dreck. At institutions of higher education, this has posed a major problem to instructors as the present generation of university students (dubbed the millenials
) routinely begin scholarly research online by googling research topics before consulting the proverbial card catalogue at their local library. As Wikipedians become the new popular authorities on topics marginal and mainstream instructors in higher education attempt to discern internet technology’s place in the classroom. While some professors simply ban students from using any electronic resources with a URL, others parties such as the LearnHigher Project — a partnership of sixteen universities forming a HEFCE-funded Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) — seek to make online tools for students, training them in how to use the internet as an effective research tool (see Internet Detective: Wise up to the Web). Information technologist Peter Morville, in addition, tackles this question of information overload in his book
Taking into account issues of access, multimedia literacy and the emerging role of web-based technology in classrooms in the U.S. and beyond, the MetaScholar Initiative at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library has launched two electronic projects designed to challenge students’ understanding of the U.S. South and provide instructors with new pedagogical tools as well as online spaces for scholarly development. After briefly identifying some of the many concerns with integrating technology and the process of scholarship and pedagogy, this paper will highlight two projects dedicated to elucidating a broader understanding of the U.S. South as well as providing tools, resources and spaces for online-based learning communities.
Both supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the internet journal
Established in 2000, The MetaScholar Initiative of the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University encompasses more than a dozen digital library projects undertaken in the past six years. The Initiative has received funding from various U.S.- based sources, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Library of Congress. Since 2002, the MetaScholar Initiative has been engaged with bringing U.S. Southern Studies to a broader audience. An initial attempt, the now defunct AmericanSouth.org (a free scholarly discovery service for primary research materials related to American South) provided the conceptual foundation for Southern Spaces and SouthComb.
American examples of born-digital publications and presses like the Berkeley Electronic Press, the internet journal Vectors and the online-only revival of Rice University Press point to a recent growth within the digital realm of the humanities. However, while many publishing initiatives seek to embrace the study of new media through their format and subject matter, the internet journal Southern Spaces reaches toward a different objective. Rather than engaging with issues of new media chiefly through its topical focus,
Founded in the spring of 2004, Southern Spaces is a born-digital, peer reviewed scholarly journal that explores notions of space and place in the U.S. South. Its topical focus is on the analyses of multiple south’s and specific southern regions; the critical scrutiny of depictions of an imagined monolithic South
; and the mapping of expressive cultural forms associated with place. Multimedia pieces published in this journal range from broad topical overviews parsed by southern region to detailed analyses of specific places over time. Through multimedia essays and streaming excerpts from conferences, interviews, presentations, performances and events,
Unlike many peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences,
open accessjournal, it is freely available to individuals as well as institutions.
The impetus for creating this journal emerged from the work of an Advisory Board of scholars then involved in the Andrew W. Mellon-funded MetaCombine Project (2003-2006) of Emory University’s MetaScholar Initiative. This project sought to provide a modular scholarly communications toolkit for Southern Studies faculty and students that encompassed new search and retrieval methods as well as new forms of digital scholarship. The Advisory Board of this project became the journal’s founding Editorial Board, and they determined that the digital medium offered as yet untapped potential for peer-reviewed scholarly publishing. Through this journal, they sought to pioneer a new model for academic publishing in the humanities. Even such well respected and exclusively web-based journals as Postmodern Culture had thus far published only text-based pieces — articles that could have been produced in print.
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
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
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
With these important policies and procedures established, the Editorial Board next concentrated on the critical feature that distinguished
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.
In recent months,
As an internet-based interdisciplinary journal,
The previous section examined how
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
outsidersand
rebelswithin 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,
As
This service provides a search and browsing interface for various information realms,
including digital archive records, web pages, collection descriptions, article abstracts & library catalog entries
All information sources indexed in the system are first vetted by scholars to ensure that they are reliable & creditable
This directory would include descriptive entries for:
Pedagogical resources will include:
All of these resources will be either harvested or generated/updated semi-automatically, with some human oversight and input.
This service provides a (filtered) RSS feed aggregation of various sources which include information on Southern Studies:
The resource is filtered by means of phrases and keywords, as appropriate to each RSS feed. The back file is archived and made searchable.
SouthComb promises to add a great deal of value for online learners as well as Southern Studies, American Studies and humanities scholars. The Combined Search Service will index high-quality information that is not searchable by Google, excluding low-quality information that Google often prominently displays. The Southern Studies Directory will collect and display information about the people and departments working in Southern Studies. A directory of this type has not been gathered elsewhere, and remains of great utility particularly to scholars new to the field. The Geographic Information Service will allow instructors as well as researchers the ability to access geographic views of requested data. In addition, it will provide a highly-desired map creation service that can be used to generate lecture materials as well as illustrative data. The Pedagogical Resources Repository will not only provide materials useful for teaching and study, but will allow users to generate and post their own syllabi and materials lists, in turn creating a repository and a cooperative community for Southern Studies instructors and a space for pedagogical dialogue.
In addition to creating a program sustainable for the long-term through the SouthComb service, this project also seeks to examine how subject-based resources can be used and amended as a learning community develops around it. Although the short term focus of SouthComb is to establish an outreach program to improve networked access to humanities collections in the regional South, the program will seek to foster best practices in multimedia content dissemination, new models of digital scholarship and new rationales for learning and teaching communities.
In this case study of two new sites for scholarly communication and pedagogy, we have introduced Southern Spaces and SouthComb and offered insight into their construction, uses and future goals. We argue that Southern Spaces provides a forum for innovative scholarship and research by taking advantage of the internet's capabilities to deliver audio, video, interactive imagery, and text in a rapid and timely fashion. Furthermore, the vast majority of the Editorial Board and the Editorial Reviewers are instructors in North American and Europe and seek to not only provide an innovative site for multimedia publication, but also to publish pieces that will bring technology into the classroom, the library, and the home of the independent learner. Similarly, SouthComb, as a new model of a scholarly communication service and online learning community, seeks to push beyond the limits of a peer-reviewed journal by offering dynamic and interactive spaces as well as research tools. In addition to challenging the conventional definitions and boundaries of the U.S. South through our preexisting as well as upcoming content, these pieces also seek to bring Southern Studies to an audience outside the U.S. South in order to engage in historical and contemporary issues of social relations, cultural identity and geographic identification across places, spaces and contexts.