Contours Collaborations is supported by the SSHRC Canada Research Chair Program (Robert Barsky, CRC: Law, Narrative and Border Crossing), Vanderbilt University, and by members of MIT’s Knowledge Futures group. Contours works in Collaboration with each contributor to develop state-of-the-art online digitized artistic exhibit and performance spaces. These spaces, tailored for each submission, will provide artists and participants with a unique ways of representing, and interacting with, artistic works pertaining to border crossing. This innovative process of creation and dissemination will be developed for online open access use by Contours Collaborations and then, consistent with the Knowledge Future’s mandate, they will be made available via open access on PubPub for future users.

The new PubPub space will have the capacity for expanded reader, and even author, engagement on PubPub. Audiences will be able to respond to and engage in conversations with the texts, and those writing/reading them.  This feature eliminates conventional borders of publishing with respect to roles and the actual borders of a page, it's margins, its gutters. For instance, the PubPub site can embed a reader's comment into the narrative of an article, just like you would an image or video, creating a work that is in constant movement, dialogue and interaction. The same applies to the exhibition space, if the artist so desires.