Thoughts on Singularum

Singularum occupies an interesting space in the world of academic journals. We stand at an historic juncture, where tomorrow the landscape of print and online journals could change entirely. In many respects, it already has. With the birth of new venues, and opportunities, we experience the decline of established traditions. How does this change thought? Or, just as important, how will this effect readership, and writing.

While we witness radical transformations in the history of publishing, both with the advent of personal blogs, online journals and new, smaller book publishers, there is also a greater emphasis, and necessity, to foster credibility amongst such projects. But, credibility, of course, is also about establishing a relationship with a reader, and not just an institution, or publisher. It's about creating a connection, and carrying on a conversation.

As giant retail bookstores now seem to face the same fate of the long forgotten local corner store, we're at an unprecedented point in publishing, and a new topography is slowly emerging. Here, at Singularum, we're extremely happy to be a part of that conversation. In many respects, our current historical position reiterates the mission of Singularum: to provide an independent venue for theorizing, transmitting, and staging encounters, transformative aesthetic encounters that every facet of life yields.  

Our First Issue at Singularum

Our first issue at Singularum has just been published. Hooray! A special thank you to each and every one of our wonderful contributors for helping us put together a world class collection of essays dedicated to the work of Alphonso Lingis.

Also, a special thanks goes out to Ann Sanford, a PhD student at the University of South Dakota, for her editorial assistance. And, thanks to Charlotte Wood, of Baan Dek, for her careful, timely suggestions.

Readability

With the launch of Singularum, we wanted to let you know about Readability. Readability, as stated on their website, "turns any web page into a clean and comfortable reading view". As we all know, reading on the internet can be a challenging experience. Enter Readability, which is designed specifically with readers in mind. "With a free Readability account, you can save your articles for reading later on your tablet, mobile phone or Amazon Kindle." As you scroll through our inaugural issue, you'll notice that we've embeded this feature on each of our articles. While we've tried to optimize the reading experience on our site, we think you'll like the added convenience of Readability, with the functionality to easily share the articles, print the articles, and even send to your mobile device.

Features of Singularum

We would now like to take the opportunity to introduce you to a few special features that we've utilized to help make Singularum a unique space.

1. Readability. With the incorporation of this wonderful and free service, you can easily print, share, and even send articles to your mobile device, or Kindle.

2. Reading Time. For your convenience, we've inserted an estimated reading time alongside each article. This feature will help provide you with a better sense of the length of the articles.

3. PDFs. We understand that we're operating in a contemporary space, with the responsibilities of a traditional academic publishing journal, so we've decided to make the articles available to download, for reference and citation purposes.

4. Experience. Reading online can be a cumbersome activity. We've tried to alleviate those concerns, keeping the reader in mind with our font selection, size and site width. The font, aptly named Skolar, is from our friends at Typekit. 

We hope you enjoy! Our next call for papers, which will be devoted to the work of Arakawa and Gins, is forthcoming. 

A multiplicity of formats

As we collect, format, edit, translate and design the first volume of Singularum, we wanted to let everyone know that the first and subsequent issues will feature myriad submission formats. For the first volume we have poetry, essays, photos, letters new and from the archive (originals from Lingis himself), as well as one other piece from the archives. Perhaps there will be audio and video, although we can't promise to have every medium incorporated into the first issue! In short, our hope is to make Singularum the kind of place that will accomodate all sorts of creative endeavors. Thanks for your patience. -ts