CNI Podcast: Expanding the Scholarly Imagination: Vectors and Multimodal Publishing - An Interview with Tara McPherson

This 31 minute podcast, recorded at the CNI 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting, features an interview with Tara McPherson, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Studies at the University of Southern California, and Editor of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.

Tara McPherson teaches courses in new media, television, and popular culture in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (USC). Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture and was a finalist for the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is co-editor of the anthology Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008). She is currently co-editing an anthology on digital narrative and politics and working on a book manuscript on the racial epistemologies of new media. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, race, and representation, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

She is the founding editor of Vectors, the multimedia peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. Vectors pushes far beyond the "text with pictures" format of much online scholarly publishing, encouraging work that takes full advantage of the multimodal and networked capacities of computing technologies. She was recently selected as one of three editors for the new MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (forthcoming from MIT Press in 2009), a hybrid online/print journal that will also explore new forms of online publishing.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org