When I asked Tara to co-host the Interactive Frictions conference in 1999, she was my junior colleague at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, writing an excellent book like Reconstructing Dixie and collaborating on the Hop on Pop anthology with Henry Jenkins. But she had formerly taught at M.I.T. and her husband was a game designer, so I knew she was eventually headed for a transmedial move. But I didn’t know that with her on-line media journal Vectors and her authoring software Scalar (both developed in collaboration with Steve Anderson and others), she would soon become an important force in fostering multimedia collaborations among various universities, publishers, and granting agencies across the nation and making it easier for other scholars to enter this field. Nor did I realize that fifteen years later we would co-author an anthology called Transmedia Frictions, which documented and expanded on “the original symposium, providing a record of the conversations begun in 1999 while also tracking their unfolding across a variety of disciplines for more than a decade.”
