MediaCommons

MediaCommons is a project for media scholars, students, and anyone interested. One of the people behind it is one of the Flow founders. It's worth perusing, even if you're not into media studies, just to see a fairly innovative use of web publishing for academic ends. Or, you know, to read about the homonormativity of Project Runway. C'mon, homonormativity. They have a "call for papers," but they're using the term "paper" conceptually -- they're really after "works of digital scholarship."

Having worked with Flow as well as a host of non-academic web publications, I'm pretty interested in efforts like this. One good thing with web-based things is that it can really cut down on the time drag in academic publishing, which is totally disruptive to things like television studies -- by the time people can publish about shows, they've gone off the air.

"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. ...

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."

Writing in a "mediated environment" sounds fantastic. I'll be interested to see how this plays out. I know I've really valued being able to bring video and images into conference presentations; being able to do that easily with my papers/writings would, I believe, be really advantageous.