What would it be like to immerse yourself into a scholarly argument as you would a movie or video game?

That is a question posed by multimodal scholars and one of the points Tara McPherson presented in her lecture "Experiments in Multimodal Expression" on Thursday, Jan. 17.

Scholars in recently emerging fields such as relational aesthetics and the digital humanities are rethinking how we do scholarship by using networked and digital tools, McPherson, an associate professor at the University of Southern California said.

"Very few scientists, I think, use physical journals at all," McPherson said. "The pre-printing of published articles is very common in fields like physics, where data sets are changing very quickly."

While many scholarly journals have made their way online, few have changed form in any significant way, McPherson said. This is particularly true in the humanities.

An example of an experiment of relational aesthetics that looks to change this is the Web site Vectors. McPherson is its founding editor.

Vectors is a journal that pushes forward from the normal text-with-pictures format of much online publishing, she said. It seeks to create a space of experimentation and focuses on visual aspects of humanities research.

Its mantra was that we won't publish anything that could appear in print. -Tara McPherson on founding Vectors Journal
Other examples McPherson offered include the Journal for MultiMedia History, the William Blake Archive and the Crooked Timber communal blog.

Each offers new aesthetic forms for scholarly productions and attempts to engage readers in a sensory-rich space.

But Vectors is unique because it provides more visual arguments, like hands-on simulations, instead of just textual arguments, McPherson said.

"We are seeing new genres of scholarship...from the animated archive to the experiential argument, to the interactive documentary, to the spatialized essay, to various forms of visualization," McPherson said.

Vectors and other Web sites will continue to grow over the years and seek to create a space where scholars can experience an argument in a robustly multimedia environment.

McPherson's book "Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South" received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award. She was co-organizer of the 1999 conference "Interactive Frictions" and is a founding organizer of "Race in Digital Space."

The event was part of the Contemporary Arts and Sciences Speakers Series and sponsored by the Department of English and the Contemporary Arts and Society faculty working group.