@Platea Discussed in a Podcast and a Journal Forum

I am pleased to announce that @Platea received some attention in academic circles this month via both a podcast (The Critical Lede) and a forum in a Performance Studies journal (Text and Performance Quarterly). 

The glacial pace of academic publishing being what it is, a piece I wrote over a year ago is just now finding the light of day (and that is pretty fast turn-around for a print journal, relatively speaking).  The latest issue of Text and Performance Quarterly has a forum on new media and performance scholarship.  The brief essays include a discussion of a podcast that reviews recent communication studies publications, an online journal of Performance Studies, and a project using a Wiki site to craft a publication.  And then there's my contribution discussing @Platea, with explanations of two of our projects: "Co-Modify" and "Following Piece 2.0."  I was invited to be a part of this forum in part because the field of Performance Studies claims performance/art as a mode of inquiry and often advocates blurring distinctions between theory and praxis, sholarship and aesthetic production.

Now, for reasons that are briefly addressed in the forum and discussed at length in the podcast, I cannot reproduce the journal pages here.  I can, however, provide a link to the Taylor & Francis publisher's website (see below), where you can either use your preexisting subscription to access electronic copies for free or pay a rather exorbitant fee per essay.  Keep in mind, as a publication in an academic journal, I did not receive any remuneration for this essay and will have to pay royalties to legally reprint my own work in any format.  That said, if you are interested, I would be happy to "discuss" the forum if you care to contact me by email (jmgray32 at gmail dot com). Ahem!

But really, I recommend The Critical Lede podcast as the better synthesis of the forum and a discussion that might be of interest to those outside of Communication Studies. In this discussion, we actually get to address the exciting possibilities (as well as the drawbacks) of crowdsourcing, public intellectuals, art as inquiry, and the ways new media are changing how we do scholarship, art, and professional/personal relationships.  I regularly confront resistance to new media in my work; for me, @Platea has been an excellent outlet to both challenge those hesitations head-on and to move beyond them into the exciting possibilities of artistic practice.

Take a listen and maybe start a conversation in the comments below.  Perhaps we can use this moment to prime our creative juices and get a new @Platea project going. It's been a while!  

Links:

The Critical Lede, Episode 085 -- Roundtable on the Performative Possibilities of New Media

Text and Performance Quarterly -- TPQ FORUM: The Performative Possibilities of New Media 

Liminalities -- This online journal pf Performance Studies is discussed extensively in the podcast.  It is open source and free to the public.  It's also worth spending a little time with.  Enjoy! 

Differences & Repetitions Wiki -- A site for open source scholarly writing.  This is Ted Striphas's project that rethinks open source scholarly writing and crowdsourcing peer review. 

Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research -- Although not a part of the the podcast or forum, this timely and recent The Atlantic article makes quite clear some of the problems we face with accessibility to traditionally published scholarship.  Nice, friendly, short background reading on what the big issues are.