Spotlight on a pioneering e-journal: Vectors

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema and Television, describes itself as mapping "the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence. As such, the journal speaks both implicitly and explicitly to key debates across varied disciplines, including issues of globalization, mobility, power, and access. Operating at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology, the journal focuses on the myriad ways technology shapes, transforms, reconfigures, and/or impedes social relations, both in the past and in the present." The Journal is edited by an international board and features both submissions and specially-commissioned works "comprised of moving- and still-images; voice, music, and sound; computational and interactive structures; social software; and much more. Vectors doesn't seek to replace text; instead, [they] encourage a fusion of old and new media in order to foster ways of knowing and seeing that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. Simply put, [they] publish only works that need, for whatever reason, to exist in multimedia."

Volume I's two issues (2006) dealt with the themes of Evidence and Mobility, respectively. Volume II's issues intriguingly pursue Ephemera and Perception (current issue). Check out the site's Archive for the back issues.