Looking Past the Written Word: Digital Authoring and the Representation of Knowledge

With the changes in publication models and rise of digital humanities, the classic monograph has come into question.  For scholars of visual culture and history, the monograph has proved a challenging form for representing scholarship. The turn to the digital though offers new outlets for communicating academic knowledge. For this panel, I will show how I am using digital and public humanities to expand beyond the monograph through my dissertation’s website component. My dissertation argues that in the 1960s the community workshop movement emerged and put the tools of cultural production such as film and video in the hands of minorities. The goal was to desegregate the media industries while providing jobs in line with the War On Poverty and challenging the problematic racist visual culture of film and television including their erasure. The website will feature an interactive map that places in space and time the development of the community film workshops, a faceted search tool of community films produced by community workshops across the country, an interactive network of the people involved in the workshops and video interviews with key people in the movement.  Through explaining the different components of the site, I will show and make an argument about how digital authoring can complement and augment the traditional manuscript.