Southern Spaces
From Digital Innovations @ Emory Libraries
Started in January 2004, Southern Spaces is a peer-reviewed online journal housed in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University that provides open access to essays, interviews and performances, events and conferences, timescapes, gateways, timescapes and annotated links about real and imagined spaces and places of the American South.
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[edit] Overview
The journal's topical focus is on the analyses of multiple souths and specific southern regions; the critical scrutiny of depictions of an imagined monolithic "South;" and the mapping of expressive cultural forms associated with place. Multimedia pieces published in this journal range from broad topical overviews to detailed examinations of specific places over time. Through multimedia essays and streaming excerpts from conferences, interviews, presentations, performances and events, Southern Spaces presents work concerned with representation of spaces and places in the South, as well as work which addresses the interrelationships of southern regions and places with other places and spaces in the wider world.
Unlike many peer-reviewed scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, Southern Spaces has no subscription fee. As an “open access” journal, it is freely available to individuals as well as institutions. Southern Spaces thus reaches a broader audience than most journals, from researchers and secondary school teachers to students, independent scholars, library patrons and the general public.
[edit] Format
Southern Spaces includes a variety of publication types, all of which share one important feature: each relies integrally on the multimedia publication environment provided by this journal. Within Southern Spaces, researchers find such content modes as “essays” (structured much like traditional articles with deep investigation of a focused topic) and “gateways” (annotated guides to particular areas of study compiled by subject experts), as well as scholarly talks, poetry performances, and interviews.
[edit] Background
The impetus for creating this journal emerged from the work of an Advisory Board of scholars then involved in the Andrew W. Mellon-funded MetaCombine project (2003-2006) of Emory University ’s MetaScholar Initiative. This project sought to provide a modular scholarly communications toolkit for Southern Studies faculty and students that encompassed new search and retrieval methods as well as new forms of digital scholarship. The Advisory Board of this project became the journal’s founding Editorial Board. They determined that the digital medium offered as yet untapped potential for peer-reviewed scholarly publishing. With this journal, they sought to pioneer a new model for academic publishing in the humanities. Even such well respected and exclusively web-based journals as Postmodern Culture had thus far published only text-based pieces—articles that could have been produced in the print medium. Southern Spaces distinguished itself by publishing scholarly works that depended upon a multimedia environment, not by using the internet as a dissemination medium for text-based scholarship.
ISSN 1551-2754
[edit] Project Staff
- Sarah Toton, Managing Editor
- Franky Abbott, Editorial Associate
- Matt Miller, Editorial Associate and Digital Media Coordinator
- Johnny Healey, Programmer
- Katherine Skinner, Former Managing Editor and Editorial Board member
For more information, contact Sarah Toton
[edit] External links
See Also:
- New Journal Entry
- Review
- Sarah Toton and Katherine Skinner. "A Space of Our Own: Bridging New Media and Traditional Scholarship with Southern Spaces in the Classroom" Journal of Online Teaching and Learning Fall 2006.
