The Archipelago of Multimedia Publishing
As academic publishing turns more and more toward peer-to-peer review, multimedia-rich work, and publication of data sets, the Vega team is developing a modular, open-source platform that can accommodate a broader range of publishing models that scholars and practitioners want to and can publish. Vega will be a free, editorial-management platform that supports peer review, copy-editing, and publication of multimedia-rich and data-driven scholarship and creative works in all areas of research. With the support of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, Vega is being designed with a unique editorial workflow that recognizes and values the importance of screen-based multimedia research, including digital humanities projects and electronic literature. What many journals and presses that publish this kind of work lack is an editorial management system that will move a piece of scholarly multimedia through the submission, review, and production processes as a single, scholarly entity. I will discuss the platform, its authorial and editorial features, and welcome questions and comments from an audience of potential users of Vega, which is only part-way through its first year of a three-year development cycle.
Speakers
Cheryl Ball studies and teaches rhetorical activities and genres in digital media and publishing contexts, emphasizing how users learn to analyze and produce texts for professional purposes. She calls this apprenticeship philosophy an editorial pedagogy. Since 2006, she has been editor of the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes digital media scholarship and is read in 180 countries. The portfolio on her website showcases her scholarship and teaching in rhetoric and composition, technical communication, and publishing studies, including articles in Classroom Discourse, Computers and Composition, C&C Online, Fibreculture, Convergence, Programmatic Perspectives, Technical Communication Quarterly, Writing & Pedagogy, and several visual rhetoric and multimodal textbooks. Her other books include a scholarly multimedia collection The New Work of Composing (co-edited with Debra Journet and Ryan Trauman) and the print-based RAW: Reading and Writing New Media (co-edited with Jim Kalmbach). Her newest book, Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects (with Kristin Arola and Jenny Sheppard), is available to order from Bedford/St. Martin's Press.
