scholarly multimedia

Highways of the Mind explores the history of the interstate highway system and its transformative impact on the physical and cultural landscapes of America. Beginning with the 1939 New York World’s Fair andtracing the development of America’s automotive culture, Highways of the Mind combines interactivemultimedia features with original scholarly content to provide new insight into the figure of thesuperhighway as a metaphor for social progress through technology. We show that thesuperhighway is a compelling 20th-century metaphor that reveals the complex nature of humankind'sfascination with technologies of transportation, from our fantasies of techno-utopianism to ouranxieties about the disappearance of nature and the dehumanizing impact of modern technology.

A scholarly multimedia work exploring the rhetorics and cultural impact of the American superhighway system in urban planning, urban/environmental criticism, ecological studies, infrastructural studies and science fiction.

Despite a general interest in exploring the possibilities of multimedia and web-based research, the humanities profession has been slow to accept digital scholarship as a valid form of intellectual endeavor. Questions about labor, peer-review, and co-authorship often arise in academic departments’ attempts to evaluate digital research in the tenure and promotion process. In this essay, we argue that these tensions stem from a general misunderstanding of the kinds of "work" that goes into producing scholarship in multimedia form. Multimedia work, we suggest, places scholars in an extended network that combines minds, bodies, machines, and institutional practices, and lays bare the fiction that scholars are disembodied intellectuals who labor only with the mind. We argue that while traditional ideas of what "counts" as scholarship continue to privilege content over form, intellectual labor over physical labor, and print over digital media, new media’s functional (and in some cases even biological) difference from old media contributes to a double erasure, for scholars working in multimedia, of both their intellectual contributions and their material labor.

(Source: Authors' abstract, DHQ)