Scholarly Online Media Journal

When I was at the McLuhan Program, we had talked about creating a scholarly journal that both provided a venue for in-depth exploration of topics interesting to the endeavours of the Program, and explored alternative ways and means of engaging the scholarly community in that exploration. For a variety of reasons, it never quite got off the ground - so far, all that has been produced is a cover page via Open Journaling System of a bunch of presentations from the 2005 McLuhan Lectures. When the content is posted, I'm sure it make for interesting reading (although without a venue for discussion and engagement, which was sort of the point at the time), simply because the participants that Twyla Gibson was able to attract to that outstanding series were interesting people.

But the journal itself as medium? Boring.

Here's a group that seems to have more than a clue about the making of a contemporary journal - especially one whose subject matter is media:

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 MacArthur Foundation, will be 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 will be 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 will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network.

The "about" page is certainly worthwhile reading for anyone contemplating a new journal, and in particular, those who are thinking about media tropes.
(Via academhack)

[Technorati tags: mediacommons | online journal | mediatropes | scholarly | publication]