51��¥

Archiving 50 Years of Art and Literature

In honor of The Vortex magazine’s 50th anniversary, some 51��¥ students and alumni have initiated the process of digitally archiving the magazine’s past issues into the university’s database.

The Vortex is UCA’s undergraduate fine arts and literary magazine and is considered one of the country’s longest-running college magazines. Since its 1974 inception, the magazine has allowed undergraduate students from all colleges and majors to submit and publish their work. The magazine’s mission is to blend all forms of creativity in a singular, contained place, much like a vortex. In addition to poetry and scripts, the magazine publishes fiction, nonfiction, photography and artwork. Over the years, the magazine has won numerous awards for its creative work, including first place in the Magazine General Excellence award every year from 2007 to 2018.

The magazine celebrated its 50th anniversary in the spring of 2024. “Wanting to promote the 50th edition of the magazine, as well as preserve its legacy and how it ties in with the history of the school, was our motivation for this project,” said Kristina Coggin ’24, former editor-in-chief of The Vortex. “I love history, and I think the magazine serves as a snippet of the student population, offering cool insight into what student life was like throughout the years.”

Marshall Cunningham ’24, a former script editor for The Vortex, creative writing major and now the owner of Bean’s Books in Pickles Gap Village, spearheaded the idea to archive the magazine’s past editions digitally. During his freshman year, Cunningham first got involved with the magazine by submitting some of his work.

“I was drawn to The Vortex because I just wanted to see my work out there,” said Cunningham. “I thought this was a great avenue to push myself to create stuff for the magazine and to actually see my work in print, in a physical magazine, which was cool.”

From there, Cunningham increased his involvement by becoming a staff member, helping the magazine’s team edit and judge students’ submissions. “Getting more involved allowed me to see what being a part of this larger literary community at UCA was like. I figured it was where I wanted to further the mission of helping bring other people’s works to the forefront,” said Cunningham.

When Cunningham began as a staff member, the magazine was working on its 48th issue. While working on this issue, Cunningham began to wonder where the magazine’s past issues were and if there was any way to access them, which there was not. From there, Cunningham and Kathleen Armstrong, a junior creative writing major, initiated the process of finding the magazine’s past issues and digitally archiving them into UCA’s database.

“The Vortex is a living legacy of all these different students and their different voices,” said Cunningham. “It would be a shame if they all put their stuff out there, only to be forgotten in the future. So, that’s why I took it upon myself to help preserve these past issues.”

Like Cunningham, Armstrong’s involvement with The Vortex began during their freshman year as a volunteer art and poetry judge. Armstrong became the associate editor for their second year with the magazine and will soon become editor-in-chief for their third year.

“My high school used to have a literary magazine for the kids on campus, but before I got to high school, it got shut down due to a lack of funding. Ever since then, I’ve been looking for something like that,” said Armstrong. “When I decided to go to UCA, I was excited to learn they had a literary magazine. So, I knew before I even got on campus that I wanted to be a part of it as a submitter and maybe one day as an editor.”

With a shared passion for The Vortex and a desire to preserve students’ past submissions, they initiated meetings with fellow Vortex staff members and Torreyson Library archivists to create a plan to digitize the magazine’s past editions. With this new project in place, Armstrong and Cunningham began working together to find and collect all of the magazine’s past print editions to scan and proof for the university’s digital archive database.

Despite the UCA Archives having many print editions, The Vortex team discovered not all issues were on file. The discovery of the magazine’s first edition proved exciting since the last copy was found in a glass display case in Win Thompson Hall. Afterward, the first edition was scanned so that its metadata would be uploaded to the university’s digital archive database along with other past editions of the magazine.

For Cunningham, archiving the magazine’s past editions is much bigger than just scanning documents into a database; it’s an opportunity for growth.

“You don’t want these issues and these people to be forgotten. They had such incredible work, and if you aren’t able to look back at what they’ve done, you can’t see the timeline of the progress of the work at UCA, the students there and the things they’ve accomplished. I just want readers to know that they’re fortunate to be in this special position to look back at 50 years of student writing, which is incredible for a magazine like this because many college magazines just don’t live that long,” Cunningham said.

The magazine has experienced exponential growth in the past year alone. During its 50th anniversary, it reached a record number of staff and student submissions and continues growing.

“Archiving is just another way to make sure that these magazines stick around because the whole reason we do this in the first place is to kind of create a time capsule of each semester for all of the creative people who’ve come together to make this community, to make the latest edition,” said Armstrong. “Printing those issues is awesome because we get to give them to those who have participated in that process. But once those printed magazines have come and gone, that’s a finite resource. Having them in a database makes them more accessible for anyone who wants to look back on previous years. It just gives each issue a longer life.”

“It’s a celebration of the past, celebrating how the past sets up for the present and the future and how the magazine is only growing,” said Coggin. “UCA offers a great example of a school that appreciates its STEM and art majors equally, and I think the magazine is proof of that.”