Call for Proposals: Multimodal Scholarship Issue

2023-05-08

This issue invites proposals for submissions of multimodal scholarship on any topic within KULA’s scope on knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation. Scholars have long called for academic publishing to move beyond the conventional formats of the monograph and the journal article and to embrace different kinds of outputs including, but not limited to, forms of knowledge creation and versioning of scholarship enabled by advancements in digital technologies. This issue is intended to provide a platform for such outputs.  

Examples of this type of scholarship might include:

  • Data visualization and sonification
  • Data scholarship
  • Photo essays, and other visual art works
  • Podcasts or other forms of audio content
  • Video essays or other forms of video content
  • Digital exhibits
  • Digital editions
  • Maps
  • Graphic novels or comics
  • Games
  • Textile creations, including beadwork, knitting, etc.
  • Other creative or practice research outputs
Multimodal Outputs

Multimodal outputs can be on any topic that falls within the journal’s scope. KULA publishes multidisciplinary work that considers how knowledge is produced, circulated, conserved, or protected—or, conversely, endangered, destroyed, or lost—in different cultural, social, political, and historical contexts. This scope includes, but is no means limited to, cultural heritage studies, archival studies, library and information studies, scholarly communication, science and technology studies, art history, digital humanities, oral history, community-based research, critical making, mapping, and digital storytelling across all disciplines. See past issues of the journal here: https://kula.uvic.ca/index.php/kula/issue/archive.

Inspired by the work of innovative journals such as Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and MIT Press’s Leonardo, the KULA editorial team plans to work closely with contributors to determine and develop, to the best of our capabilities, the technical infrastructure needed to support their work. To enable this ongoing co-creation, we will be able to accept only a select number of proposals. Please note too that, since multimodal outputs are not always possible to de-identify, we will not conduct fully anonymous (“double-blind”) peer review of multimodal submissions. Review will be “single-blind”—that is, the identities of the contributors will be known to the reviewers, but the reviewers will remain anonymous.  

Proposals should describe the multimodal output that contributors will produce or have already started producing, the technical requirements and challenges they anticipate, and a rationale for the scholarship’s multimodality. 

Articles

In this issue, we are primarily interested in publishing multimodal outputs, not critiques of or scholarship on multimodal outputs. However, we will be including a select number of scholarly articles that consider the long-term infrastructure needs of non-textual and multimodal research outputs (including open standards and open-source software and the role of libraries and repositories as partners in this work), that use media archaeological approaches to reflect on obsolescent technologies and formats, that analyze the ways that modes and sites (e.g., libraries, salons, and coffee shops) of knowledge production and circulation have changed throughout history, and that address issues of equity and accessibility related to multimodal publishing. These articles will undergo traditional anonymous (“double-blind”) peer review.

Articles might address questions such as:

  • How do we create sustainable multimodal scholarly outputs?
  • Where are multimodal outputs hosted? How/where do we preserve them?
  • Are there considerations for indexing and discoverability?
  • Can we produce multimodal outputs to ensure equitable access in parts of the world where there are technical challenges (e.g., with internet connectivity)?
  • What are the accessibility standards that multimodal publications need to meet?

Please submit proposals of 250-300 words through the journal’s website at https://kula.uvic.ca by August 1, 2023. Please submit the proposal as you would a manuscript. Once you have created an account on the journal website, you can submit at the following link: https://kula.uvic.ca/index.php/kula/submission/wizard. If you are proposing something multimodal, please submit your proposal as a Word document to the section “Multimodal Outputs.” If you are proposing a traditional research article, please submit your proposal as a Word document to the section “Research Articles.” In both cases, please indicate in the abstract section of your submission that it is a proposal for the “Multimodal Scholarship” issue.

We expect to notify applicants whether their proposals are accepted in late September 2023. Our anticipated deadline for full submissions is January 2024.

If you have any questions about the submission process, please reach out to Co-Editor Samantha MacFarlane at kulajournal@uvic.ca.

KULA is an open-access journal requiring no author publication charges (APCs). Authors retain full copyright to their works, which will be published under a CC-BY license.