PROJECTIONS OF DESIRE AND DESIGN IN EARLY MODERN CARIBBEAN MAPS

Iconic early European maps of the Caribbean depict neatly parcelled plantations, sugar mills, towns, and fortifications juxtaposed against untamed interiors sketched with runaway slaves and Indigenous toponyms. These extra-geographical symbols of racial and spatial meaning projected desire and design to powerful audiences. Abstractions about material life influenced colonial perceptions and actions upon a space, often to deleterious effects for the Indigenous and African people who were abused in tandem with the region's flora and fauna. The scientific revolution curbed these proscriptive and descriptive ‘thick-mapped’ features that offer historians an underexplored record of early colonial Caribbean life beyond the geographically descriptive. Before this shift from mystery to mastery, the early correlation of colonization and cartography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides a fascinating glimpse into the process of creating the Americas. This article offers ideas for deconstructing old maps as new sources for historians of the early Atlantic World. As digital readers may explore through the roughly fifty maps linked via the footnotes, their informative spectacle naturalized colonialism upon lived and imagined race and space, created an exoticized, commodified Caribbean, and facilitated wealth extraction projects of competing empires made profitable by African labour on Indigenous land.

Like Water & Oil? Fashion photography as journalistic comment

In its August issue 2010, Vogue Italia ran a 24-page fashion editorial by photographer Steven Meisel. Entitled ‘Water & Oil’, it was inspired by the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that began in April that year. The shoot caused an uproar in both new and old media. Across the journalistic coverage of the shoot and the attendant commentary from digital readers and bloggers was an underlying sentiment that a boundary had been crossed, that high fashion photography had no right to use environmental catastrophe as a backdrop for the promotion of fashion. Much of the online commentary echoed Angela McRobbie’s argument, that fashion media (and especially Vogue) can only conceive of political reality as ‘gestures of style … they can never take the form of social analysis’. This essay poses two questions: can fashion photography sometimes perform the usually journalistic work of cultural and political comment? And how can we understand the resistance to such a function, especially in a commercial women’s magazine like Vogue? Sitting at the intersection of cultural studies and journalism studies, it will draw on the work of John Hartley to answer these questions. Laying out the discourse surrounding the controversial photo spread, this essay explains how the images created by Meisel are ‘matter out of place’. They provoke us to re-evaluate what journalism is and who is allowed to perform it.

Reinvention of Publishers´ Revenue Model - Expectations of Advertisers towards Publishers´ Products

Publishers struggle to generate profit. With the introduction of digital content this situation even got worse. While there are millions of digital readers, the loss of revenue streams from selling content to customers is enormous. Publishers really have to turn towards a new business model. As shown in previous studies users expect digitalization and the enhancement of magazines from printed products to digital offers including user generated content (UGC) and platforms for discussions. Publishers have reacted to these new demands and provided new products and features. Nevertheless, users are less and less willing to pay for digital content. Therefore, important remaining questions are: How can publishers earn money? And what is the profit formula of this new business model? We assume that advertising companies are going to play a prominent role in the new business model. Hence, this paper focuses on the profit formula of publishers and therefore the expectations of advertisers. To underline those assumptions the present study explores advertisers´ interest in communities of readers who simultaneously contribute to discussions in order to derive implications for the revenue model of publishers. Therefore (1) a pre-study was conducted followed by (2) qualitative interviews with managers from advertising companies. Our findings show that both using communities as a tool for customer research and the direct interaction with users are of value to advertisers. The results also present other possible services that publishers could offer advertisers in conjunction with addressing those communities of contributing readers. Referring to the widespread term “User Generated Content” as well as to Eric v. Hippels concept of users with specific application knowledge in their field of expertise we call those contributing readers “user”.

Research Brief: Innovation for New Revenue Streams from Digital Readers: The Case of VG+

This case study of VG+, the platform for paid digital content published by the Norwegian media outlet VG,reports a process of innovation for new revenue streams in the digital news market. As is typical of suchmedia innovations, development and change have been stepwise and gradual, responding continuouslyto experience. Data gathering and mapping of users’ behaviour have been crucial for these innovations.Such knowledge about users has informed changes to the product, resulting in growth of customers andrevenue streams.

Opening the Early Modern ToolBox: The Digital Interleaf and Digital Commonplace Book

This paper considers how early modern note-taking practices can inform the design of digital reading environments. In particular, it argues that proximate, handwritten note-taking is essential for both memory retention and archiving, and that digital readers should work within structures that allow for such practices. The Digital Interleaf, the first of two conceptual prototypes introduced, offers one response to that need: a multi-layered page designed for individual and social annotation. The Digital Commonplace Book, the second of the prototypes discussed, provides a method for indexing notes from the Digital Interleaf. These two interoperable concepts are the first in a suite called the Early Modern Toolbox.