Media Arts + Practice (MAP) Professor at the School of Cinematic Arts Steve F. Anderson was named a 2013-14 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Innovation Fellow for his study of Technologies in Cinema. Anderson teaches in the MAP Division at SCA and is the co-Principal Investigator of the Scalar Labs that are revolutionizing scholarship for the digital age.

“We’re thrilled to have the American Council of Learned Societies recognize the revolutionary work Steven has been doing in advancing digital scholarship,” said Dean Elizabeth M. Daley from the School of Cinematic Arts. “Steve's approach to academic research is creative and inspiring, and his work is becoming increasingly critical to efforts to define scholarship in the digital age. We are so proud to have him represent the Media Arts + Practice Division and the Scalar Lab and congratulate him on this prestigious award."

The seven awardees, representing a variety of disciplines, methodologies and institutions are charged with pursuing intellectually significant research that advances the digital transformation of scholarship in the humanities. The Digital Innovation Fellowship Program is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“The 2014 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellows were selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants for their potential to move beyond the application of basic digital capacities to accomplish groundbreaking digital scholarship,” said Steve Wheatley, Vice President of ACLS. “The research projects of this year’s fellowship recipients will probe massive collections of data in novel ways, resuscitate and preserve marginalized primary sources, and pioneer new forms of multimedia scholarly publication.”

Media Arts + Practice, within the School of Cinematic Arts is devoted to exploring the potentials of scholarly expression, visual storytelling, data visualization and social media, including business, education, medicine, urban planning and law, areas in which the ability to use media to communicate effectively is increasingly essential.

The Scalar Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts explores new forms of scholarly publishing aimed at easing the current economic crisis faced by many university presses while also serving as a model for media-rich digital publication. In essence, we are creating a pipeline to support emerging genres of scholarship that moves from soup to nuts, integrating core intellectual questions in our fields with content acquisition, training for scholars in digital research methodologies and new paradigms and partnerships for publication, dissemination and warranting of scholarship.