Being a multimedia scholar, I am interested in exploring the ways in which online spaces can be used to make academic ideas and projects accessible to non-academic publics, as well as how they can work to increase interactions between people inside and outside the university. As a way to experiment with these possibilities, I became involved with the two digital projects below.
agnès films
My friend and colleague Caitlan Spronk and myself created agnès films as our final project for Patricia Sullivan and Jennifer Bay's Archives & Digital Humanities course in 2010. Our original idea was to create a community of female filmmakers who could support each other regardless of geographical locations. Our Resources section provides visitors and members with useful links to film festivals interested in women's work, available grants, etc. We also hoped to have basic articles on sound, editing, cinemtography, lighting, etc. to provide guidance to those interested in filmmaking but not yet proficient in it. Though these goals remain important for us, the goals of agnès films have broadened since its incipience, as has our editorial staff. In September of 2010 we were joined by film, media and communications scholar and filmmaker Denah Johnston as our Experimental and Fringe Film Editor.
In an effort to make the site more interactive, we began having featured members. It started as a way to help members get to know each other, but soon became a vehicle for them to share their stories of working within the film industry and trying to make or support feminist and female-centered films and videos in a male-dominated industry. Our featured member posts, as well as our featured documentarist interviews are some of our most popular features, pointing to the great interest our community has in personal filmmaking stories. We now see providing a stage for intimate stories from filmmakers about their work and trajectory as one of our main aims.
We also quickly learned that while our goal was to aid women filmmakers in their journey, men have much to contribute to that aim as well. Morever, men also create and support feminist and female-centered work, so we have fostered the inclusion of male members and contributors to the site. Another change that came as we found our voice as a community was the realization that since Cait, Denah and myself are all academics, we are in an excellent position to make this site be a place where filmmakers and academics can come together. We believe this union is important because they have so much to gain from each other. Academics who work with film but don't produce it benefit from having a better understanding of how the filmmaking process works and from interacting with working filmmakers. While a filmmaker's work can gain recognition as well as reach wider audiences if it is written about in scholarly publications or used in the classroom. Thus, creating a gathering place between these two groups, as well as those who straddle both worlds, like Denah and myself, has become an important focus for us.
As the editor-in-chief of agnès films, I work closely with our contributors through multiple drafts of their work and lay out each articles's aesthetic design. I also try to creae greater visibility for our community by reaching out to film festivals, filmmaking communities, schools and organizations, academic associations interested in film, and individual filmmakers and scholars who might be interested in joining us. Seeing the agnès films community grow and become increasingly important to its members both on the site itself and on our Facebook group has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic career and I look forward to the new directions the site will take.
PRESENT TENSE
In the summer of 2009, I was invited to join a group of fellow Purdue Ph.D. students—Joshua Prenosil, Cristin Elder, Megan Schoen, Ehren Pflugfelder, Caitlan Spronk and Allen Brizee—in founding a rhetoric online journal. The idea was to publish short articles (we had a 2,000-word limit, which we later expanded to 2,500 words) dealing with the kind of timely topics that lose some of their relevance when going through a long review process in other academic publications. After much discussion we settled on the name Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society for our venture. We spent almost a year in different committees—I was in the web design and the text development committees—researching other online journals and scholarly publications to help us understand how we wanted to fit into what was already out there and also find our own voice.
One of our goals from the beginning was to publish the sort of rhetorical scholarship that would be useful to rhetoric and composition scholars but also appeal to other fields and to non-academics interested in rhetorical thinking. Due to the manageable length and accessible tone of our articles, we also hoped that they would become a resource for faculty looking to challenge their students with scholarship that addresses current events. It was also important to make Present Tense the sort of journal where articles on race, gender and sexuality would be published, which is why we made a concerted effort to have a review board as diverse as the articles we hoped to see in our issues.
As the journal's multimedia editor, I have sought to foster the publication of articles that make extensive use of video, images and hyperlinking, helping authors with technological questions and helping define the journal's aesthetic when it comes to articles that make use of the multimedia possibilities available in an online journal like ours. Not only has the journal thrived since its first issue but collaborating with my fellow editors has been one of the most educational and enjoyable aspects of my academic career.