About MediaCommons

MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network is community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects are being developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network.

What you see here now is an early stage along the way toward that network. Our most successful feature to date is In Media Res, but we have also now opened blogging to any registered user, and we are soliciting proposals for our future large-scale projects.

Our hope is that the interpenetration of the different forms of discourse will not simply shift the locus of publishing from print to screen, but will actually transform what it means to “publish,” allowing the author, the publisher, and the reader all to make the process of such discourse just as visible as its product. In so doing, new communities will be able to get involved in academic discourse, and new processes and products will emerge, leading to new forms of digital scholarship and pedagogy.

For this reason, we want our readers and our writers intimately involved in MediaCommons not just after its fuller realization, but in its preliminary stages of development. Get involved in the various conversations around the blog, videos and project proposals. Submit a video yourself, or better yet, a proposal for a larger publishing project. Help us set the agenda for the future of publishing in media studies.

Read more about the MediaCommons editors here.

More information about the genesis of MediaCommons is available in the following essays:

• Introducing MediaCommons
• MediaCommons 2: Renewed Publics, Revised Pedagogies
• MediaCommons 3: Continuing the discussion
• Initial Responses to MediaCommons

Related essays:

• On the Future of Peer Review in Electronic Scholarly Publishing
• Toward the Establishment of an Electronic Press
• Teaching in a “collaborative, interactive, multimediated, networked, nonlinear, and multi-accented” Environment

Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Avi Santo