Welcome to the Southern Spaces blog. Since our first publication in 2004, Southern Spaces has been invested in peer-reviewed, multi-media, open-access scholarship. Over the past few years, we have redesigned our website, updated our audio and video, and significantly expanded our readership. As an online journal working at the intersection of a number of scholarly disciplines, we find ourselves in the midst of exciting conversations about the nature of digital publishing.
We hope to continue engaging in these discussions by cultivating relationships with a diverse range of scholars and providing a platform for interested readers to participate. We plan for this blog to be a space for dialogue about scholarship and current events, for connections to other scholarly communities, and for discussing our digital publication processes.
Our blog will:
- Explore our publication process. We will describe our editorial processes, interview authors, and write about how a Southern Spaces publication is built.
- Consider our work in the context of digital publishing and the digital humanities. We will examine issues of open access and peer review, talk about finding and presenting multimedia scholarship, and share great tools and vexing questions.
- Discuss contemporary and significant issues in the study of the US South. From the redistricting of Texas, to the announcement of a new cultural non-profit collecting 78rpm records, to the use of Confederate flags at Croatian soccer games, we will present short, scholarly posts about subjects that engage with southern spaces.
- Provide a space where people can engage with our work, through guest posts and commenting. We hope that this blog will also connect people to our current and past publications on Southern Spaces. We hope that people will use it as an entry point to explore our journal. We hope that our posts here may even serve as sources of inspiration for future essays, videos, and presentations. Further, while most of the posts will be written by our staff, we are excited about publishing posts by scholars, teachers, artists, and other interested people. Please contact seditor@emory.edu if you are interested in writing for us. Finally, we are excited to include a commenting feature on our blog. For years, we have discussed the role of commenting on Southern Spaces (which will be the subject of a future post), and we are happy to take this step toward fostering meaningful dialogue with our readership.
Thank you for joining us in this new endeavor, and please do check out our most recent journal publications by visiting our home page!