Wanted: works of digital scholarship to launch MediaCommons, a media studies network dedicated to the development and publication of dynamic, electronic, writing within an open community of scholars.

We are seeking proposals for innovative “papers” that engagingly explore some aspect of media history, theory, or culture through an adventurous use of the broad palette of technologies provided by the digital network. “Papers” need not conform to any specific length, format or subject. Applicants are in fact strongly encouraged to blur traditional boundaries between scholarly and non-scholarly genres, and to explore peer-to-peer networks as a tool for collaboration and exchange, and even as a new structural paradigm for critical writing.

Why “Papers”?

Obviously, the term doesn’t quite apply. While MediaCommons may, at some strategic moment, use print technologies for the further dissemination of the texts that we publish, the use of “paper” here is not meant to suggest any adherence to the traditional journal/book format of scholarly work. We want the texts we publish to use the network’s technologies to the fullest, and thus these texts, “born digital,” will never really be reproducible on paper.

However, the notion of the “paper” is an important one within academic circles. “Papers” are official, reviewed, strategic forms of participation in a scholarly field. Our colleagues and our administrations know how to read a paper, and, most importantly, know how to accredit it. By contrast, “projects” — a term that might more accurately describe the kind of work we’re hoping for — are fuzzy and of uncertain status within academic credentialing processes.

By deploying the notion of the “paper,” we hope to indicate that the shift in the mode of publishing, and even in the mode of writing, that MediaCommons is promoting is *not* a move away from the serious critical goals of more traditional scholarly modes. Instead, it is an attempt to improve access to such scholarship and to update the discursive modes available within scholarly writing…

Why MediaCommons?

MediaCommons is a response to the host of systemic problems that afflict academic publishing today. Scholarship — and particularly scholarship in a field as fast-moving as media studies — is hindered by the often debilitating time-lag between the completion of a piece of writing and its publication, and by yet more delays between the publication of that text and release of any reviews or responses to it. These time-lags have been worsened by the increasing economic difficulties threatening many university presses and libraries, which each year face new administrative and financial obstacles to producing, distributing, and making available the full range of publishable texts and ideas in development in any given field.

The combination of such structural problems in academic publishing has resulted in an increasing sense of disconnection among scholars, whose work requires a give-and-take with peers, and yet is produced in greater and greater isolation. These problems are particularly acute for media studies scholars, who need the ability to quote from the multi-mediated materials they write about, and for whom form needs to be able to follow content, allowing not just for writing about mediation but writing in a mediated environment.

MediaCommons seeks to transform the landscape of media studies scholarship by providing a dynamic publishing space where words and moving images can interact, and where timely critical discussions among peers in the process of developing new work become an integral part of what it means to “publish.”

Submission Guidelines

Project proposals can be submitted directly on this site and will be posted to a public review area where authors can engage with one another, as well as with other interested scholars, MediaCommons editors, and other participating readers. During this feedback phase, authors will be free to edit and amend their proposals, and are encouraged to establish links and synergies with other submitted projects.

At the end of this public session, the editors will select four to six projects to develop as the first round of texts to be published through MediaCommons. The selected applicants will be invited to a meeting in New York or L.A. this Spring to meet with MediaCommons editors and designers.

Interested contributors should submit a brief abstract of no more than 250 words (which may include audio, video or images), as well as a full proposal (5,000 word max.) detailing the project, its goals, and its projected timeline.

Submit proposal

Please direct any questions or inquiries to Kathleen Fitzpatrick (kfitzpatrick@mediacommons.futureofthebook.org) or Avi Santo (asanto@mediacommons.futureofthebook.org).

More information about MediaCommons, its origins, and its goals, is available here.