| MERLOT
Journal of Online Learning and Teaching |
Vol. 2,
No. 3, September 2006 |
|
.
A Space of Our Own: Bridging
New Media and Traditional Scholarship
with Southern Spaces
in the Classroom
Sarah Toton
Graduate
Institute
of
Liberal Arts
Callaway
Center
Emory
University
Atlanta
,
GA
,
USA
stoton@emory.edu
Katherine Skinner
Robert
W.
Woodruff
Library
Emory
University
Atlanta
,
GA
,
USA
kskinne@learnlink.emory.edu
Abstract
This case study explores the use of new media and online
content in
U.S.
classrooms of higher education through an examination of the
internet journal, Southern
Spaces. We argue that
Southern Spaces provides a forum for innovative
scholarship and provides for unique teaching opportunities by
taking advantage of the internet's capabilities to deliver
audio, video, interactive imagery, and text in a rapid and
timely fashion while also facilitating new ways of organizing,
presenting, and updating research. Our case study offers a
detailed overview of the philosophies behind Southern Spaces,
three examples featuring Southern Spaces in the classroom and
a brief discussion of pedagogical implications for the
website.
Introduction
Over the past decade, institutions of higher
education have become more technologically savvy, both in and
beyond the brick-and-mortar classroom. Such
institutional experiments as wireless campuses, online
classrooms, instructor podcasts, network-sharing services and
one-to-one computing initiatives provide instructors and
students with a multitude of communication tools that are
intended to better integrate instruction and learning into
their lives. Adoption
rates of these tools by professors have been slow but steady,
and various institutions and associations have begun
discussion of how publishing using new technology can work
with the tenure process (Jaschik,
2006.) In addition, technology
divisions at Emory
University, California
State University, Fullerton and Indiana
State University, among others, not only offer free
instructional classes for Blackboard and other course
management systems, but also such incentives as stipends and
computers.
With the buzz surrounding these interactive
technologies for teaching and learning, it should come as no
surprise that in recent years, departments ranging from
Computer Science to English have introduced "new media
courses" to undergraduates at institutions of higher
education. Marketed with tempting titles like “Cyberculture,”
“Network Society,” “Digital Theory and Emerging
Media,” these courses seek to educate rising scholars
in multimedia literacy and interdisciplinary scholarship.
These new media courses often attempt to analyze both the
course subject matter and the effects of different media
formats. In the
hypermedia syllabi for such courses, links to assignments in
new online journals engaged with issues of emergent media
coexist with digitized excerpts from media studies readers, technological
histories, and case studies.
The resulting mix provides students with nightly
readings and daily points-of-interest—most of which are
available to them in cyberspace.
Frequently a boundary forms between these new
media explorations and more traditional classroom endeavors. Not
surprisingly, course titles themselves serve as demarcations
in the digital divide between born-digital content and
print-based publications. Courses titled as "New
Media" often deal with emergent media topically,
offering a virtual free-for-all that allows students to
explore everything from Google
to Facebook.
Conversely, classes with titles like "Introduction to
American History", "Southern Literature" and
"Creative Writing" tend to remain bound to print
publications as online, freely available content is either not
conducive or unavailable for course reading assignments. Rare
exceptions, many of which have been driven by Digital History
Centers at such institutions as the University
of Virginia, George Mason
University, University
of Houston and the University
of Nebraska, tend to use digitized primary source material
within the classroom, but still rely primarily on the print
medium to provide scholarly readings associated with their
course topics—largely, because few non-print resources for
such contextual materials exist.
Examples like Berkeley
Electronic Press, the new Rice
University Press, the online journal Vectors,
and numerous text-encoding
initiatives point to a recent growth within the digital
realm of the humanities. However, while many publishing
initiatives seek to embrace the study of new media through
their format and subject matter, the internet journal Southern Spaces reaches
toward a somewhat different objective. Rather than engaging
with issues of new media chiefly through its topical focus, Southern
Spaces works to bridge the digital divide between
traditional scholarship and new media by publishing on
subjects conducive to an American history or literature
course, but employing many of the multimedia formats (print,
audio, video, etc.) now available through the World Wide Web.
In addition, the journal (hosted by Emory
University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library) remains
committed to digital preservation standards as well as serving
multiple browsers, platforms and connection speeds.
Operating with a small staff of student
assistants, librarians, research faculty and collegiate
instructors, this peer-reviewed internet journal offers
one of the first bridges above the chasm between traditional
topics of scholarly inquiry and new media applications by
distributing a variety of multimedia scholarship on a
range of topics relating to Southern cultural studies.
This introduction to Southern Spaces discusses what
this internet journal offers, why it was developed, how it has
been used within the college classroom and future pedagogical
implications for online scholarly communication tools.
Bridging
the Chasm: Southern
Spaces
Founded in the spring of 2004, Southern
Spaces is a born-digital, peer reviewed scholarly
journal that explores notions of space and place in the U.S.
South. Its 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 parsed by southern region to detailed analyses 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.
Figure 1:
Southern Spaces mainpage on Firefox, (March 8, 2006)
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.
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, MetaCombine
-style:normal">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.
As they began planning the journal’s structure,
the Editorial Board determined that the success of a new model
for digital publication would require two major
accomplishments. First, the model would need to resolve
several major barriers to adoption of the digital framework
for scholarly work, including publishing its contents in a
permanently citable location. Second, it would need to promote
a fusion of multimedia elements, including interactive maps,
images, sound and video files, and data sets, into the
scholarly productions such that these became integral parts of
the publication, not mere auxiliary materials.
At its inaugural meeting in 2004, the Editorial
Board established several key policies and procedures for the
journal. With regard to barriers to adoption, they carefully
approached four key issues: copyright, citation, version
control, and cataloging. They created a copyright statement
that favored the rights of the author, granting only first
publication rights to the forum. By providing authors with
explicit rights to republish their materials elsewhere, the
Board sought to embody the principles of “open
access” and “open
content” publications. This is unusual within scholarly
publishing, as most publishers claim that the ownership of
published material resides with the publisher, not the author.
Further, this move anticipated the conundrum of tenure review
that has plagued digital publications. As most tenure review
boards do not yet consider digital publications—even
peer-reviewed journal articles—in the same light as
peer-reviewed print scholarship, many scholars are unwilling
to risk publishing in this medium. By providing scholars with
the right to republish their materials elsewhere, the
Editorial Board hoped to allay the fears of this significant
community of tenure-seeking scholars.
The Editorial Board likewise addressed the
barrier of citation. Scholars and independent researchers have
reported their reluctance to cite Internet-based resources due
to the ephemeral nature of these resources. Many digitally
published websites change their content at-will without
alerting readers of the changes, move locations or Uniform
Resource Locators (URLs) repeatedly, and a large number of
sites disappear altogether without warning. As a result,
citing web pages often yields frustration, both for authors
and readers of their work. The cited content may change after
a scholar has cited it; it may move to a different location;
or it may vanish altogether, leaving the author and her/his
readers in unverifiable terrain. The Board elicited the
support of the Robert. W. Woodruff Library at
Emory
University
, the website’s host, to provide stable URLs for the
site’s content. All Southern
Spaces publications are given a standard URL that encodes
key information about the piece, including the author’s name
and the publication year. These URLs do not change; nor does
the content listed at each page. The Library has made a
commitment to maintaining this content in its current
locations ad infinitum.
Information regarding this policy is relayed to the reader
through the website on a “Cite
This Page” link that appears on every publication page.
This citation policy relates to a third issue
addressed by the Editorial Board in 2004: that of version
control. In the print medium, it is not possible to make
changes to a publication unless the publisher is willing to
print a new edition. As such, authors cannot add to, subtract
from, or even correct typos from their work after it
appears—not because doing so is undesirable, but because it
is too costly. One of the chief benefits of publishing within
the digital medium is that the cost of changing a word, a
link, an image, or any other component of a site is
negligible. If an author comes across new information relevant
to a previous web-based publication, s/he can even add this
information to the existing piece, and in doing so, enrich its
scholarly value.
The Editorial Board wanted to capitalize on this
feature of digital publishing, but wanted to do so in such a
way that every change is transparent to the reader, and every
version of a piece is accessible through its original citation
(or URL). The Board thus established procedures for amendments
to published works, and determined that such amendments could
not be made to the original piece, but would instead be made
within a new version
of that piece. The original piece remains at its published
URL—no changes can be made to that piece in order to ensure
that the content matches any citation a reader may include in
her/his own work. New versions are given clearly identifiable
URLs that connect it to the original publication without
replacing it. Likewise, every publication that contains
versions also contains a version-management page that links to
every published version of the piece, and that provides a
“tracked-changes” option to enable readers to quickly
identify what changes were made between each version.This maintains both the permanence of content expected
by researchers and
the flexibility of the medium for published authors.
Finally, the Board broached the issue of
cataloging published essays, gateways, and other Southern Spaces formats. Libraries have long cataloged scholarly
journals; however, they have done so by issue, not by
individual publication. The convention of issue-based
publication was constructed in order to allow newspapers,
magazines, journals and other periodicals to publish batches
of works at particular temporal moments—a cost-saving
mechanism in the print medium. Such a convention does not
naturally apply to the digital medium, where publication can
occur on a rolling basis without incurring additional cost.
Given that another asset of the digital medium is the
relatively quick turn-around time from submission to
publication, releasing pieces on a rolling basis is a highly
desirable quality for a Web-based journal. Southern Spaces
adopted a policy of publishing content on a rolling basis, but
needed a way to catalog contents to make them more visible
through library catalogs and other indices of published works.
The Editorial Board charged the Managing
Editor and Editorial Associates with resolving this issue.
Working in tandem with the Woodruff Library’s
Technology and Metadata Librarian, the Managing Editor and
Editorial Staff created a cataloging format based on a current
library standard, MODS (Metadata
Object Description Schema), to catalog the journal’s
contents at the publication level. Each essay, gateway,
interview, performance, and presentation published in Southern
Spaces is provided with a full catalog record. This record
is stored in the code of the lead html-encoded page of the
published piece and is submitted to relevant indices,
including
Emory
University
’s library catalog.
With these important policies and procedures
established, the Editorial Board next concentrated on the
critical feature that distinguished Southern
Spaces from other digital journals—its focus on
publishing works that cannot be published in print. The Board
wrote a call for submissions and submission
guidelines that explicitly sought scholarship that fully
integrated text and multimedia elements. The Board and staff
have worked collaboratively with authors since the release of
that call in order to fulfill this mission.
Within Southern
Spaces, readers now find a permanent archive of exciting
and diverse published materials. Highlights include the
following examples:
·
William
G. Thomas III’s “Television
News and the Civil Rights Struggle: The Views in Virginia and
Mississippi,” which documents
the difference in journalistic responses to the Civil Rights
Movement in particular places (Virginia, Mississippi) and
spaces (print, television). He demonstrates with archival
images and television footage that local television news
broadcasts in
Virginia
in the fifties began to address the segregation issue in ways
substantially more balanced and desegregated than the print
media, while a major television station in
Jackson
,
Mississippi
, worked hard to defend segregation and deny access to
opposing voices, both local and national.
·
Virtual
poems by Minnie
Bruce Pratt, Natasha
Trethewey, and Honorée
Fannone Jeffers provide readers/viewers with an intimate
view of the poet performing her poem in the space and place it
addresses. For example, award-winning poet Natasha Trethewey
reads “Elegy
for the Native Guard,” a poem about a
Gulf
Coast
island’s Civil War memorial that forgets the service of
African American soldiers. She leads her viewers through that
space of
Ship
Island
, showing the readers where the Daughters of the Revolution
whitewashed the historical marker and where Hurricane Camille
literally washed the black soldiers’ bodies out to sea.
·
David
Wharton’s photo essay, “Roadside
Architecture,” depicts the humanly-made physical
landscape of functional buildings in
Mississippi
and other parts of the deep South. He shows that buildings
constructed for practical uses are often imbued with
unintended beauty. His photographs demonstrate the way that
this unexpected aesthetic beauty coexists with functionality
within such structures as agricultural buildings and churches.
In that merging of the practical and the beautiful, Wharton
finds an almost Emersonian correspondence of principle and
form.
Southern
Spaces,
as a new digital environment for humanities and social science
research, endeavors to transform the intellectual landscape in
provocative ways. Adding
to the ensuing hum of activities in digital library
initiatives, digital history centers, and various individual
ventures into internet publishing, Southern
Spaces works to open the space of scholarly communication
while challenging traditional venues of academic scholarship
through its multimedia format and open-access distribution
model.
Figure 2: Collage of Southern Spaces essays and poems. [Clockwise from top right: David
Wharton’s “Roadside
Architecture”; Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy
for the Native Guard” ; William G. Thomas III’s “Television
News and the Civil Rights Struggle: The Views in Virginia and
Mississippi,”; Honorée
Fannone Jeffers’ “Tuscaloosa:
Riversong.”]
Pedagogical
Applications
The internet provides a limited source for
locating course syllabi, blogs and discussion boards. For
every syllabus posted on the internet, dozens remain hidden on
closed institutional servers and networks.
Southern Spaces web-usage
statistics indicate that Southern Spaces articles have been used in higher education courses
at Stanford and
University
of
Southern California
, among others, few syllabi specifically assigning Southern Spaces exist online. Therefore, the Southern Spaces staff performed an informal survey of Editorial
Board, Editorial Reviewers and affiliated faculty in order to
gain examples of classroom uses for the online journal.
After reviewing Southern
Spaces-related presentations and readings with various
faculty, we chose three examples of assignments employing the
internet journal.
Currently, uses for Southern Spaces within the classroom are two-pronged and are either
based primarily on the content or the format. First,
instructors use selected content from the journal as the
foundation for instruction and classroom discussion relating
to specific topics within the fields of Southern Studies,
American History, Literature, etc.
Second, instructors use selected content from Southern
Spaces as a foundation for discussions regarding the
format of the journal itself. In these examples, the medium of
Southern Spaces rather
than its content provides examples of how individuals are
using new media in their scholarship. I will begin discussion
of pedagogical implications for the journal with an example of
this latter use.
Because Southern
Spaces has endeavored to set itself apart from text-based
online journals in the realm of digital publication (with
success so far) it provides a unique example for peer-reviewed
online scholarship. Professors often employ the journal
itself, as well as its contents, as an object of study. In
particular, classes engaged with topics of new media have
cited Southern Spaces for examples of how incorporate new media into
traditional scholarship.
In “Comparative Studies in Emerging Media,” a
graduate course in the Moving Image Studies program at Georgia
State University, three
Southern Spaces pieces provided examples of alternatives to
traditional print publications (
S Zebulon Baker
, “Whatwuzit?:
The 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics Reconsidered;” Chuck
Leavell, “Family
Forestry in Twiggs County, Georgia / Live in Macon at the
Douglass Theatre;” Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, “Tuscaloosa:
Riversong”). These pieces were selected to illustrate
how the online medium influences scholarly content and to
discuss advantages for translating traditional forms of
scholarship into open-access online environments.
The course’s instructor, Prof. Ted
Friedman, saw the
Southern Spaces presentation in the course as beneficial,
particularly for junior scholars relatively new to the
scholarly publishing realm: "It
really opened up my graduate students' eyes to the
possibilities of multimedia scholarship." The
dozen graduate students (from communications and education
departments) appeared to be impressed by the creativity and
dynamic structure of Southern
Spaces pieces, voicing an interest in examining Southern
Spaces and other web-based journals as potential sites for
their own research.
[Assignment 1]
Please look at the journal, Southern Spaces: (http://www.southernspaces.org/)
by navigating through the Southern Spaces website and
reviewing 2-3 self-selected pieces.
[Assignment 2] Produce a creative work which experiments with new media
forms. The project can be a short film, a screenplay, or a
multimedia work. When submitting the final version, include a
3-page essay relating your work to ideas from the class.
To encourage his students to think creatively about scholarly
communication as well as their own publications, Prof.
Friedman offered students the option of a “creative
project” due at the end of the semester. Two students
produced short videos, comparable to “Tuscaloosa:
Riversong” in terms of time length and su Angle Professor in
the Humanities at the
University
of
Nebraska Lincoln
, developed a writing assignment for his course on the U.S.
South using Southern Spaces. Prof. Thomas asked the forty students taking the
upper-level undergraduate course in Spring 2006 to write an
analytical review of one of the twelve pieces then listed in
the events and conferences section.
[Assignment] Third
Review Essay: Review of Southern Spaces (www.southernspaces.org)
Event--
(http://www.southernspaces.org/con_eve_con.htm)
pick one of the events/conferences
and write an analytical review with reference to 3 other
readings/documents in this course.
Prof. Thomas found that a majority of the class
chose to analyze either Prof. Kevin Kruse’s lecture on
segregation in Atlanta, titled “White
Flight: The Strategies, Ideology, and Legacy of
Segregationists in Atlanta,”
or Prof. Karyn Lacy’s lecture examining assimilation and
community formation in two counties outside Washington, D.C.,
titled “Negotiating
Black Identities.” A
number of other students chose to write on activist Constance
Curry’s presentation, “Resegregated
Spaces: The Schools-to-Prisons Pipeline”
or Prof. Steven Hahn’s “The
Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History.”
While Prof. Thomas has used Southern Spaces in other courses, this assignment in particular was
added for the Spring 2006 U.S. South course. After the course
concluded, Prof. Thomas surmised the benefits of the
assignment in addition to using Southern
Spaces in the classroom.
The essays were very good and made students think
about the current South and the meaning of history for
different southerners. I consider it a real success.
We had no technical difficulty. Everyone was able to
view the lectures in chunks, and they watched them in detail,
took notes, and clearly really thought about what they were
saying. This was the third review essay after one on a
book and one on a film. All of them required an
integration of primary source and secondary readings. So
for example on Lacy quite a few used Anne Moody’s Coming
of Age in Mississippi and Barbara Fields’ essay,
“Ideology and Race in American History” as well as primary
sources to evaluate/discuss Lacy's thesis. It was really
interesting for them.
Prof. Thomas also sees the resources on Southern Spaces as
particularly significant given the location of his home
institution in the Midwest: “courses
on the South are in fact taught outside of the South and to
have access to Southern
Spaces as a central repository of lectures and materials
on the region is critical in this teaching from outside the
region.”
The theoretical effect of this assignment is important to
consider: by asking
University
of
Nebraska
students to analyze video content published in an online essay
and refer to three other course texts, Prof. Thomas encourages
his students to develop their analytical skills across media
formats. While many students taking a traditional Southern
History course learn how to read and analyze print
publications, adding Southern
Spaces to the classroom encourages students to exercise
their analytical skills regarding visual media and online
content. This incorporation of new media into a traditional
subject area is especially important at this time as more
members of the technologically-enamored “millennial”
generation take their seats in the college classroom (see
also Center for Digital Education, 2004).
Another instance using
Southern Spaces content in a take-home assignment comes
from
Michigan
State
University
’s Spring 2006 Basic Telecommunication Policy course.
Here, students were asked to read an excerpt from
William Thomas III’s essay, “Television
News and the Civil Rights Struggle: The Views in Virginia and
Mississippi.”
[Assignment]
Please
read the following text which is the part of a larger essay
that focuses on facts surrounding actions by the FCC and the
courts in the famous case regarding Jackson Mississippi’s TV
broadcast station, WLBT. Questions on this text and policy
involved are presented below the essay material: For your
information the full body of the essay of this material is
found at http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2004/thomas/4g.htm
Additionally you may well find it necessary to use the
web to find additional information on the WLBT case and that
you should do to possibly earn strong scores!
As with Prof. Thomas’ assignment, the instructor asked
students to find additional resources, however in this
instance, they are challenged to exercise their research
practices and “use the web” to find added information
regarding this historic case.
Although the assignment targets young scholars at different
educational levels with different interests, all share at
least one foundational principle: students can benefit
analytically from reviewing selected Southern
Spaces articles, and this exposure can either impact the
way they view academic scholarship or even change they way
they view their own scholarship. Whether in a New Media, a
Southern History or a Telecommunication Policy syllabus, Southern Spaces can serve instructors and students by providing
material as well as insight for reading assignments, writing
exercises or final projects.
Pedagogical
Implications
With the growing popularity of electronic and internet-based
resources, instructors and institutions endeavor to integrate
cyberspace and the classroom. Some of the most notable
attempts have taken place within the History field, but
Sociology, Literature, Rhetoric and Economics have also seen
substantial pedagogical growth online. While one of the most
obvious applications of Southern
Spaces is in the virtual classroom provided by online
courses and remote teaching, new pedagogical concepts like the
inverted classroom work to combine online time and
face-to-face interaction. This section will review selected
studies from the growing literature on new technology and new
teaching philosophies.
“The Internet and the Inverted Classroom” (Lage and
Platt, 1999) made a mark on the learning landscape a few years
ago by encouraging the use of a divided course website broken
into online lectures, bulletin boards, student materials and
gradebook, and a library featuring resources for self-directed
study. Built to mirror four real-world spaces—the classroom,
the coffee shop, the desk and the library—the Inverted
Classroom concept is now popularized through web-based
commercial online systems like WebCT and Blackboard.
Nonetheless, the core concept of providing lecture materials
in an interactive format online and saving undergraduate class
meetings chiefly for group problem solving, discussion and
experiments remains somewhat elusive.
Although Southern Spaces does not contain a discussion board
or gradebook, the site does allow for a more mobile, dynamic
classroom experience. Through book and poetry readings,
conference presentations and musical performances, Southern
Spaces not only offers online lectures and primary
resources, but does so by also integrating text and web-based
sources into one online freely-accessible space. Rather than
offering something akin to an instructor podcast or taped
lecture, Southern Spaces
articles often go beyond the podium and the video camera by
adding supplementary materials such as field footage, maps and
outside data. One
example, Mary Odem’s lecture “Global
Lives, Local Struggles: Latin American Immigrants in Atlanta,”
was built from a conference presentation as she and a Southern
Spaces videographer crafted a piece featuring documentary
footage as well as visual data difficult to present on an
overhead projector (let alone a video of an overhead
projector). Similarly, Honorée
Fanonne Jeffers’ “Tuscaloosa:
Riversong” not only offers a short film of the author
reading her poem, but also features two talks by Jeffers about
writing “Tuscaloosa: Riversong” and her use or river
imagery. Through on-site tapings, field footage and
cooperative editing sessions, Southern
Spaces offers a dynamic content portal that not only
offers students chances to view lectures anywhere with an
internet connection, but provides valuable material in a style
impossible to replicate live in the classroom environment.
Southern Spaces’ dynamic
use of the medium to present a more innovative lecture offers
one significant reason for either bringing web resources into
the classroom or bringing the online classroom into the dorm
room. However, the journal’s place within the library offers
another teaching opportunity and another challenge. While Southern
Spaces is not a traditional
archive (or a “traditional digital archive”), it
complements many existing digital repositories, both within
the wider cultural studies realm and the history field. At
present, work within Digital History projects, programs and
centers represent much of the effort to bring historical
resources to an online user. Primary
sources such as documents, images, footage and personal
accounts are now available to the teacher and learner online
because of large government endeavors like The Library of
Congress’ “American
Memory” web portal and numerous university-housed
projects like “Valley
of the Shadow,” “Documenting
the American South,” “Virtual
Jamestown” and the “Hurricane
Katrina Digital Memory Bank.” The relatively low
economic barrier to putting resources online has contributed
to this proliferation in historical resources. However, this
low threshold also challenges the instructor and the student
to evaluate the worth and validity of every site encountered.
Canadian researchers found that individuals evaluate the
“quality” of a website within a fraction of a second and
based on its aesthetic appeal. However, fully evaluating the
content of any website would take considerably more time to
process (“First
Impressions Count for Web”, 2006). While we cannot
correct such user practices, Southern
Spaces seeks to demonstrate the quality of its contents by
conducting strict peer review for its submissions, and
directly states that its contents have been subjected to this
level of scholarly vetting on its home page. Yet, although
this peer-review offers piece-of-mind to contributors and
users, one of Southern Spaces chief endeavors to add to its quality is working to
make findability a chief priority. While a website’s search
and browsability may not strike many instructors or
researchers as a key evaluating concept, the ability for many
types of users to locate content on the site significantly
impacts the learning experience in addition to increasing the
findability of content not only on the site, but also in
library catalogues as well as internet search engines.
Engaging with work by Peter
Morville in its operating philosophy and offering four
browsing schemes for its content and a dynamic search tool, Southern
Spaces differs from both traditional journals and
hardbound archived collections. An eighteen-month cataloging
process has further provided Southern
Spaces with metadata for library catalogs. Although Southern
Spaces lacks extensive online archives of historical
resources, its gateways and essays often include primary
sources either in the piece, in hyperlinks or in recommended
resources section. This publishing model provides an
accessible organizational framework easy to navigate as well
as search through. This allows instructors ease-of-use in
finding relevant materials for course sites, syllabi and
lectures; and it provides a helpful resource to young
researchers, just learning how to effectively use technology
for their own scholarly interests. As of June 2006, Southern
Spaces will also begin discussion regarding the creation
of a supplementary archive featuring video footage, original
images and historical documents from selected Southern
Spaces articles. The intention of this aim is to produce
yet another searchable repository on Southern
Spaces servers for interested teachers, students and
researchers.
As an internet-based interdisciplinary journal, Southern
Spaces combines subject matter covering fields of inquiry
over a host of media and formats. Although the journal focuses
on spatiality and the American South, the Editorial Board and
staff endeavor to bring content applicable to courses focusing
on American
Literature and History,
as well as Arts,
Music,
Media
Studies, Economics,
Environmental
Studies, Social
Policy, Education,
Religion,
Race
and Ethnicity Studies, Gender
and Sexuality Studies, Government
Policy, Leisure
Studies and Geography.
With over fifty pieces published since 2004 and nearly twenty
pieces in progress, Southern
Spaces presents multiple fields of humanistic inquiry
through new media applications.
Conclusions
In this case study, we
have introduced Southern Spaces as well as offered
insight into its development, uses and future goals. We argue
that Southern Spaces
provides a forum for innovative scholarship by taking
advantage of the internet's capabilities to deliver audio,
video, interactive imagery, and text in a rapid and timely
fashion while also facilitating new ways of organizing,
presenting, and updating research. By providing permanent URLs
and electronic archiving for published materials, Southern
Spaces makes a commitment to a stable digital presence for
scholarly endeavors, both research and pedagogically related.
The vast majority of the Editorial
Board and the Editorial
Reviewers are instructors in North America and Europe and
seek to not only provide an innovative site for multimedia
publication, but also to publish pieces that will bring
technology into the classroom, the library, the dorm room and
the home of the independent learner. Although Southern Spaces is not the bridge
in the digital divide between new media and traditional modes
of scholarly inquiry, it does present a bridge, offering
interdisciplinary scholarship to a large audience of potential
students and instructors.
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