The Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies (PIMS) Yearbook

The Panoramic & Immersive Media Studies (PIMS) Yearbook is the annual yearbook of the International Panorama Council (IPC, Switzerland), published by De Gruyter (DG, Germany). It surveys the historical and contemporary landscape of panoramic and immersive media.

This interdisciplinary field includes—but is not limited to—optical and haptic devices; 360-degree paintings; long-form paintings, photography, and prints; dioramas; museum displays; games; gardens; literature; maps; music; printed matter; still and moving images; virtual and augmented reality; and theatrical productions. Whereas the notion of the panoramic describes extensive, expansive and/or all-embracing vistas, immersion refers to porous interfaces between representation and the real, observer and observed, nature and culture, and past, present, and future. Together, the concepts of panorama and immersion have catalyzed time- and space-bending strategies for creating, experiencing, and transforming culture, ideas, and built and social space across the arc of human history.

The IPC is an international organization of panorama specialists committed to supporting the heritage and conservation of extant nineteenth and early-twentieth-century panoramas, and promoting awareness of the medium’s history, derivative forms, and contemporary iterations. As a non-government and not-for-profit association subject to Swiss law, the IPC is active in the fields of panorama research, restoration, financing, management, exhibition, and marketing. The PIMS Yearbook succeeds the International Panorama Council Journal (IPCJ), a selected proceedings of the annual conferences of the IPC, published 2017–2023. 

The PIMS Yearbook will be published in print and digital formats. The print version will include a limited number of color illustrations.

Executive Editors

Dr. Molly Briggs, School of Art & Design, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Logge, Universität Hamburg, Germany

Nicholas C. Lowe, Professor, John H. Bryan Chair of Historic Preservation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

Call for Contributions for v.02, 2025

The call for v.02, 2025 will go live in May 2024. Meanwhille, please review our call for the 2024 IPC Conference.

Call for Contributions for v.01, 2024

The Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook (PIMS Yearbook) invited contributions for publication consideration in its inaugural yearbook. Contributions were due 03 December 2023. 

This open call invites scholarly, creative, and practical contributions in seven areas including scholarly essays (subject to double-blind peer review); visual and creative essays; restoration, management, and field reports; opinion pieces; IPC conference reports & papers (this section is open only to IPC conference presenters; papers are subject to single-blind peer review); reviews; and reprints. We welcome contributions from IPC members and non-members alike. The PIMS Yearbook is managed by a team of three Executive Editors and six to ten Section Editors. In addition, each annual issue assembles a team of one to four Invited Guest Editors. Section details appear below

SECTIONS

Thematic Essays | Panoramas, Immersive Media, and Lost Worlds

The double-blind peer reviewed section invites scholarly essays that speak to the theme of Panoramas, Immersive Media, and Lost Worlds. (Each year’s theme matches that of the preceding year’s IPC Conference, but the call is open to all and not limited to conference presenters.) Panoramas and other apparatus of immersive media, both in the past and today, strive to recreate worlds that might otherwise be “lost.” They do this in many ways, such as by transporting us across distances of time and space we cannot travel, or into imaginary realms we cannot conjure ourselves. In so doing, they afford experience we could not have otherwise. While they may be effective in reconstituting past worlds, their colonizing visions sometimes obfuscate or disempower the voices of their subjects. Panoramas themselves become lost as well; many are known only through their fragmented presence in the historical archive. We invite a diverse range of interpretive approaches to the topic of lost worlds and the history and practices of panoramic apparatus and immersive experience. Contributions should be anonymized for double-blind peer review.

Invited Guest Editors

Liz Crooks, ​​Director, University of Iowa Pentacrest Museums, Iowa City, IA, USA

Melissa Wolfe, Curator and Head of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO, USA

Forum

The Forum invites opinion pieces and interviews with opinion leaders, offering insight more broadly on current debates and public conversations surrounding old and new immersive media. Contributions for this section make an argument, are delivered in the author’s own voice, are based on fact, and are drawn from the author’s research, expertise or experience. They take the form of  short personal essays that debate current topics around panoramas and immersive media. For example, they may explore the historical and contemporary uses of immersive technologies in preservation and heritage interpretation, as tools for exploring contested heritage, in museum interpretation and display, in educational settings, as entertainment and leisure enhancements, and in the service of promoting nationalist and imperialist discourses.

Section Editors

Dr. Leen Engelen, LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven, Belgium

Dr. Robin Skinner, Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka, New Zealand

Restoration, Management, and Field Reports

This section invites writing on the preservation, restoration and management of panoramas, dioramas, and other immersive interfaces and attractions.

Section Editors

Patrick Deicher, President of the Bourbaki Panorama Foundation, Lucerne, Switzerland​​

Gabriele Koller, Curator of the Museum Panorama Altötting, Altötting, Germany

Visual and Creative Essays

This section invites artistic approaches including visual essays, creative writing, and other makerly modes of reflection and material research on immersive media.

Section Editors

Prof. Dr. Thiago Leitão de Souza, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Nicholas C. Lowe, Professor, John H. Bryan Chair of Historic Preservation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

32nd IPC Conference Report & Papers

This single-blind peer reviewed section publishes the IPC President’s Report and IPC conference program, abstracts, keywords, and presenter bios. It also invites conference presenters to contribute papers based on their presentations. Conference presenters are welcome to contribute to this section or any other section.

Section Editors

Dr. Blagovesta Momchedjikova, Expository Writing Program, New York University, USA

Dr. Molly Briggs, School of Art & Design, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

Reviews

This section invites reviews of recent books, exhibitions, events, performances, archives, and products of a panoramic and/or immersive nature.

Section Editors

Ruby Carlson, Curator, Velaslavasay Panorama, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Suzanne Wray, Independent Scholar & Researcher, New York City, NY, USA

Reprints

This section makes space for revisiting articles, documents, other printed media and objects pertinent to the study of multimodal immersive technologies and media. Subject to permissions, this section features previously published, out-of-print and out-of-copyright materials understood to be significant to the production, reception and study of panoramas and other related panoramic media. Contributions may also include historical and unpublished manuscripts, and/or other archival materials, including illustrated presentations of objects, and optical devices. Contributors should supply a short editorial/introductory essay to contextualize their proposed article, paper, document or object. For historical, archival and unpublished manuscripts, contributors should obtain a print-ready image and present the reproductions and permissions details alongside their essay.

Section Editors

Dr. Molly Briggs, School of Art & Design, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Logge, Universität Hamburg, Germany

Nicholas C. Lowe, Professor, John H. Bryan Chair of Historic Preservation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

To Contribute

Contributions to the Thematic Section are first reviewed by the invited section editors and then subject to double-blind peer review. Contributions to the Conference Reports & Papers section are subject to single-blind peer review. All other sections are reviewed by section editors and PIMS Yearbook editorial board. Following the initial review of submitted materials, PIMS Yearbook editors may re-assign a submission for consideration by another section editor. On occasion, a submission will be recommended for publication in a succeeding volume.

The PIMS Yearbook  accepts original and complete manuscripts written in the English language. Contributions to the Thematic Section must be prepared for anonymous review. Upon submission, please indicate which section you are submitting to:

1. Thematic Essays | 2023 Theme: Panoramas, Immersive Media, and Lost Worlds (double-blind peer review)
2. Forum (edited)
3. Restoration, Management, and Field Reports (edited)
4. Visual Essays (edited)
5. International Panorama Council Conference Report 2023 (single-blind peer review)
6. Reviews (edited)
7. Reprints (edited)

Guidelines

1. All manuscripts should be submitted electronically as MS Word documents to pimsyearbookipc [at] gmail [dot] com
2. The subject line of the e-mail should indicate the name of the Yearbook (PIMS Yearbook) and the first word of the section to which the manuscript is being submitted (for the categories, see above).
3. Contributions to the peer-reviewed thematic essays section should be prepared for anonymous review and contain an abstract of up to 300 words and 4 to 7 keywords. To anonymize, submit author name(s), affiliation, and contact information in a separate file and redact citations of the author’s own previously-published works. Contributions to the Thematic Section are sent to anonymous reviewers selected from De Gruyter’s pool of established scholars.
4. Word limits:
• Thematic Section, up to 10,000 words inclusive of notes, references, image caption, and author bio. In exceptional cases we can accommodate up to 15,000 words.
• Reprints submissions should be accompanied by an original introduction, up to 800 words.
• All other sections, up to 3000 words.
5. Images:
• For all sections, include images that are central and necessary to the argument; do not include images solely for the purposes of illustration.
• Contributions to the Visual Essays and Reviews sections can be more image-rich.

Formatting (all submissions)

1. Please refer to De Gruyter’s style sheet. 
2. Word document, justified to the left.
3. Times New Roman font: 12 point for text and block quotes, 10 point for footnotes.
4. Double spaced, excluding footnotes and block quotes, which are single spaced.
5. Add free lines before and after headings and block quotes.
6. Quotations of four or more lines should be indented as block quotes, without quotation marks.
7. Do not indent the first paragraph in any section or sub-section.
8. Indent all second and subsequent paragraphs in sections and sub-sections.
9. Do not separate paragraphs by free lines.
10. Use standard formatting for headings, including the Introduction and Conclusion, and number sections in Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3…). Subheadings should follow (1.1, 1.2, 1.3…).

Reference Style

1. All manuscripts should follow American English and the conventions of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), 16th Edition.
2. Use the Chicago author-date system for in-text citations. Further elaborations that do not fit into the main text may be placed in footnotes, though authors should keep them at a minimum. Bibliographic entries need only be provided in the References section.
3. References should be provided in full and in alphabetical order at the end of the article. See the examples below.

Journal Article

Sider, Theodore. 2020. “Ground Grounded.” Philosophical Studies 177: 747–67.

Book

Heller, Steven. 2014. Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design, 3rd edition. New York, NY: Allworth Press.

Braddock, Alan C., and Christoph Irmscher, eds. 2009. A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History. Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905) 1960. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

• Spell out “Edited by” or “Translated by” for citing books with an editor or translator apart from the author.
• Use the abbreviation ed. (or eds. for more than one) when an editor takes the place of an author for citation. See CMOS 9.58–63
• When there is more than one author or editor, the first name of the second author or editor should precede the family name: Smart, Mark, and Michael Debt.

Chapter or part of an edited book

Trumpener, Katie. 2022. “Stalin Boulevard: Panoramic Vistas and Urban Planning in Eastern European Photobooks.” In Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations, edited by Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala, 17–42. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Additional Requirements

1. Abbreviate number ranges: 316–17 (with an en dash) in in-text citations, footnotes, and references.
2. Use un-spaced em dashes in the text.
3. When citing multiple works by the same author in the References section, write the author’s full name in every entry.
4. Add States to towns when referencing books: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5. Emphasized and foreign words should be italicized.
6. Add “’s” rather than “’” to a name that finishes with s: “Socrates’s” (not “Socrates’”)
7. Indent by tabulator only, no manual spacing.
8. Type one space (not two) after periods, commas, and colons.
9. Do not use single quotation marks, except within a quote already enclosed by double quotation marks.
10. Insert notes without changing the preset options on Microsoft Word’s “Footnote and Endnote” feature, and do not renumber notes.

Send contributions and questions to pimsyearbookipc [at] gmail [dot] com

All contributions were due 03 December 2023

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