Signs: Studies in Graphic Narrative - new scholarly journal

SIGNs – Studies in Graphic Narratives – is a new, international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on Comics (or, in contemporary jargon, Graphic Novels), from modern times up to the early decades of the 20th century. Read more here.

Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review

Participate in a blog-based peer review experiment!

Expressive Processing is the name of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press.

He's decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: ask the Grand Text Auto blog community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.

MediaCommons: a digital scholarly network

"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."

On her blog, scholar Danah Boyd wrote a short essay for review by her colleagues entitled "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace". The idea was consumed - and transformed - by bloggers and news outlets world wide.

She wrote an interesting response to the criticism and misinterpretation her essay received, indicating that "I didn't write my piece for the audience who ended up consuming it." A fascinating example of how the web is transforming academic scholarship.