The law which established the university in 1945 gives it three main goals: to educate, to investigate and to promote culture. The third goal, “promoting culture,” is ambiguous, since “culture” has been a changeable concept for the university over the past sixty years; in the beginning it was understood as “knowledge about arts,” but nowadays, it comprises sciences, social studies and humanities. It can thus be understood as part of the social responsibility of the public university in Mexico, which has to provide cultural spaces and media for a nation that has no other means to develop them. But the concept can also be understood as all the activities performed inside those spaces and media, activities that tend to promote culture among the population.

Magazines have been, since the first days, one of the tools created by the university to promote culture. The first magazine created to support this goal was the Revista de la Universidad de México. During the 1940s, promoting culture was understood as promoting certain arts, basically graphical and lyrical. Later on, during the 1970s, some groups of scientists from the university began to promote natural science as an important branch of knowledge that had been forgotten by cultural promoters. During the next twenty years, then, many magazines attempted to promote scientific knowledge in the university, until the arrival in 1998 of Cómo vez, a print magazine that reports on science from the UNAM. The university, having separated the arts from science, now faces the challenge of promoting the more recent conceptualization of “culture,” that is, the humanities and social sciences, which don’t have this kind of channel.

The Revista Digital Universitaria, first published in the year 2000 (http://www.revista.unam.mx/vol.0/index.html), is sponsored by the Direccion General de Cómputo Académico, an administrative department which has played, and continues to play, a central role in the introduction of Web technologies and Internet services, not just to the University but to the entire country. Serving a community of 279,000 students and 41,000 teachers, the magazine acquires special duties and some advantages over its paper peers. Among these duties are the responsibility to be an inclusive and representative magazine for the entire university, to further the students’ education and teachers’ improvement, and to target general audiences. To achieve these goals, the magazine enjoys certain advantages. With no commitment to a single meaning of culture, it can publish articles about arts, humanities, social studies and science. It can, and actually must, develop investigative and editing techniques. It is committed to promoting culture with an appropriate diction, with interesting topics and with creative expositions.

Although only six years old, the magazine has lived two ages. During the first one, the main purpose was to use the digital technology, but not to explore or to understand it. During the first three years, the editing guidelines of a paper magazine were applied to this digital publication. Doing so created some problems with the magazine’s personality, because it was compared with paper magazines, and also because it attempted to be a magazine of specialized investigations, but specializing in “everything”.

In 2003, a new editorial team, the one which I lead, took charge of the magazine. While planning the next season of the magazine, we had to answer three main questions: What are the goals and duties for a digital magazine that should be representative of the whole university? How should we define the magazine’s personality, since we hadn’t defined the kind of content that would be included? What kind of editing guidelines must a digital magazine have?

We answered those questions as follows. The magazine’s goals and duties are to create a space for innovation, development, practices and education in the world of digital publishing and to promote analysis, reflection and creation among the university’s population by means of digital resources. The supporting idea was and still is to make digital editing the main topic of the magazine, and to discover new tools, ways and guidelines for a rapidly developing area of publication that has not yet established its own rules.

Our goal and our duty therefore coincide: the magazine should be the workshop of digital editing at the university. The magazine’s personality should emerge from the same idea: it is defined by its articles, which are digitally edited. That means a non-lineal publication that takes advantage of Internet resources such as hypertext, graphics, image and audio, regardless of their source or the topic of the article — science, arts or social studies — so that we can test the web’s possibilities for publication.

All of this resulted in two basic challenges. Who would be the authors, designers, editors and programmers? Because there were no digital editors in Mexico in 2003, we didn’t have a proper culture of digital publishing. In finding authors, we had two problems. First, we needed a great number of authors to get enough articles for a monthly publication. Second, we needed authors who could think in digital terms. And it was the same for editors, designers and programmers; we needed them to think in digital terms.

We solved the amount problem by turning the magazine into a monographic publication. Every month we propose a main topic and give it to a manager — commonly a professional investigator in the corresponding area — who contacts the authors on his own. The number of articles in each issue depends mainly on the manager’s leadership. But finding authors, editors, designers and programmers who can think in digital terms remains our principal job, because the magazine has a pedagogical role. Since it promotes the use of new technologies, we need to develop an intentional strategy to educate the new professionals for the new media.

When we asked ourselves how to educate and inform editors, designers, programmers and writers for the environment of digital publishing, we realized that the magazine and its collaborators must develop, beyond the proper use of digital tools, some abilities that could make possible the digital representation of scientific, humanistic, technical, artistic and cultural languages. The goal was that, by means of those abilities, the magazine and its editors, designers, programmers and writers would be able to make the digital expression of those languages and styles offer something different and better than its written expression. Since the magazine itself has been an experimenting and teaching tool, it is possible, in the course of developing those abilities, to follow the road of tentative solutions, in the first place, and the way of the magazine’s consolidation, in the second, in order to get a digital rebuilt of languages and expressions.

The nature of the Revista Digital Universitaria and its immediate challenge and goals, have led us to explore the nature of digital editing, its aims, and its possibilities to enlarge the academic communication and the promotion of knowledge. Our work is far from ended, of course. But in the latter years we have built the bases to promote the culture of digital editing and to form a group of editors, designers and programmers who can think in digital terms. It is hard to foresee who the digital authors of the future will be. We don’t know if they will be experts in the technical aspects of Internet and multimedia, or authors deeply concerned with the creation of texts and their digital interventions or representations.

Anyway, the main goal of the magazine, by now, remains the same; to create the tools and the experimental spaces for any kind of author, the highly technical or the essentially creative. Finally, the magazine is still an invitation to explore on the digital editing world.