Karen Hellekson

...today is my birthday.

I have plans to see Wall-E and then go to a friend's house for dinner afterward. Whee!

Thanks to all for their good wishes!

Here's a card my cousin sent me:


Spock sock

Go here for a summary of my paper at SFRA 2008.

On Times Online, a review by Michael Saler entitled The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture, book review of David Hajdu, The ten-cent plague: The great comic-book scare and how it changed America; and Michael Chabon, Maps and legends: Reading and writing along the borderlands.

Saler organizes his review around conceptions of high versus low culture. Of Chabon's book, Saler notes:

Munificent artists can’t be contained within the arbitrary distinctions between literature and genre, the “serious” and the “entertaining”. Chabon doesn’t need to reach for his gun to dispatch such distinctions. He simply redefines them: “All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction”.

Hear hear!

Copy Editor: The Movie

Bwa ha ha! Not coming soon to a theater near you, but I'm excited to see that for people who don't work at home, copyediting is so...confrontational and physical.

At ICFA-29, I presented a paper entitled "Fandom Wank and History." Here's its abstract. The same basic information has been accepted for publication in an edited volume about community and online tools. I plan to expand the essay greatly by adding in a discussion of The Ms.Scribe Story to illustrate how blog-based historical texts are generated with the benefit of time and hindsight.

Abstract: Fandom Wank and history

Historical discourse is firmly situated in the realm of the trace: a document, be it a bill of sale or the registry of a wedding, provides unmistakable proof that an event occurred, and historians study such traces to construct a narrative document based (one hopes) in fact. As the realm of res gestae (things done), history's rhetorical activity is one of telling the truth. However, the Internet muddies this historical trace by permitting deliberate rewriting and obfuscation: blog posts can be rewritten; Web sites can be taken down; online comments can be edited.

One site that dramatically illustrates the possibility of this activity in the realm of fandom is Fandom Wank, a blog-based online community that exists solely to describe—and mock—fandom blowups. Descriptions of altered traces abound: offending entries edited, entire blogs deleted, entries locked or deleted, comments disabled. Yet next to these descriptions of altered traces may sit proof of the original text: damning screen shots, IP address traces, links to archived Web pages. The wank I used to illustrate my paper, chosen because it was recent, because it has sensational elements, and because it illustrated all my points, is called How NOT to Date a Celebrity.

Fandom Wank foregrounds the activity of fans who use blogs to collaboratively write a kind of history of an event as it happens by tracking elements of the trace even as the trace is being erased and literally rewritten, thus constructing a new form of historical writing, with its own rules of acceptable proof of the trace. I argue that fan blogs discussing current events in fan culture are actually historical writings that are imbued with community-specific meaning. The point of such an activity is to create a collaborative text that brings together relevant traces, documentation, and testimony in an effort to construct a persuasive document.

My coeditor, Kristina Busse (kbusse), and I have received two inquiries about the copyright the journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is using.

We have written a blog post that explains the copyright we have chosen and why. We also address the main question that these two people asked: why is TWC retaining copyright, and not the author?

The short answer is that this is standard in the industry. The long version of our answer is here. I'm disabling comments here to force discussion to be appended to the relevant blog post.

This is cross-posted to my WordPress blog here. Feel free to comment in either space.

Remember

An analysis of Torchwood 2.05 "Adam"

Contains major spoilers!

1. Analysis of memory and forgetting

[1.1] In Torchwood 2.05 "Adam," the Torchwood team has a new colleague: Adam. He's their new best friend: Jack's confidant (he recruited Adam 3 years ago!), Tosh's lover (it's the 1-year anniversary of their first kiss!), all-around great guy. He's even in a clip or two in the show's opening credits. But despite all their memories of times shared, our heroes have only known him for 2 days. Adam is an alien who only has reality when others have memory of him. He feeds that memory into people by touch, and by so doing, he constitutes his own existence.

[1.2] Torchwood 2.05 “Adam” is interesting to me because of the ways it explores the fascinating historical idea of the trace. In addition, it explores the idea that memories comprise the person, and if one alters, so the other necessarily must. The character of the aptly named Adam takes this one step further: memories literally create a person, and without them, he is literally nothing. He would disappear, his existence restricted, doomed to drift in the Vortex. To exist, he must construct false memories in others, thereby creating a false reality in a house of cards that, as we learn, can't be sustained for long.

[1.3] Paul Ricoeur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, notes that there are three kinds of trace: the kind of trace associated with our brains, which can be analyzed by brain scans and neuroscientific analysis; the trace of affect, or the inscription of something onto the soul; and the more usual documentary trace, which comprises written records, archives, and writing. In "Adam," all three kinds of trace are in evidence, with the last kind, documentary trace, resulting in Adam's discovery and downfall.

( Read more... )

The book I coedited with Kristina Busse (kbusse), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, was selected as a title for review at RCCS for the month of March. Check it out here. Kristina and I had the opportunity to respond to the reviewer's comments, and our response is there as well.

Here is the blurb from the RCCS:

each month, the resource center for cyberculture studies (RCCS)
publishes a set of book reviews and author responses:
http://rccs.usfca.edu/booklist.asp. books of the month for march 2008
include:

Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture
Editor: Michael D. Ayers
Publisher: Peter Lang, 2006
Review 1: Lori Landay
Review 2: Shintaro Miyazaki
Review 3: Marc W.D. Tyrrell
Editor Response: Michael D. Ayers

Cyberspace Romance: The Psychology of Online Relationships
Authors: Monica Whitty, Adrian Carr
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
Review 1: Rhiannon Bury
Review 2: Michele Hammers

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays
Editors: Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse
Publisher: McFarland & Co., 2006
Review 1: Lan Xuan Le
Author Response: Karen Hellekson & Kristina Busse

The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
Author: Anne Friedberg
Publisher: MIT Press, 2006
Review 1: Christy Dena
Author Response: Anne Friedberg

enjoy. there's more where that came from.

—david silver

This is cross-posted at my WordPress blog here. Feel free to comment in either space.

[1.1] On January 31, Flowtv.com published an essay I wrote entitled From Irrelevance to On-Demand: Changing Models of Dissemination, which Flow summarizes as, "Innovative Internet distribution models in music and television strike back against Big Media hegemony." It's an analysis of the irrelevance of current modes of distribution of media, and I provide two grand experiments that attempt to use the Internet to bypass these modes, one in music and one in live-action TV: Radiohead's online, pay-what-you-want release of their album In Rainbows, and the production of Web-only TV show Sanctuary.

[1.2] No sooner does this essay come out, of course, than it's obsolete: In Rainbows is no longer available for download from the artists, and Sanctuary has parleyed the success of its Webisodes and its viral fan base into a 13-ep deal with SciFi.com, which will involve reshooting the entire show. SciFi.com, in Sanctuary Comes to Sci-Fi, emphasizes the virtual sets. Executive vice president of original programming Mark Stern notes, "This stylistic approach to virtual sets has proven hugely popular on the big screen, and we have been looking for a chance to use it on a television series." 300 and Sin City, which were both filmed with extensive CGI, were precursors that tested the genre and proved it viable.

[1.3] Whereas SciFi.com emphasizes the technological advance of green screen shooting, a blog entry entitled Green Means Go at the official Sanctuary site emphasizes the fans: "A big reason why this television deal was secured, was on the strength of our popularity online. Sanctuary, the TV show, would not have happened without the immense popularity of Sanctuary the web series and we have you, the fans, to thank for that."

[1.4] At Gateworld.net, in part 1 of a two-part interview, Sanctuary star and producer Amanda Tapping emphasizes that the Web presence will still be important to the project, with content and fan interactivity there not seen on TV. However, the project's big limitation was, unsurprisingly, money:

[1.5] I think our intention was to try and launch a completely Internet series, but the model doesn't work yet to monetize it. The business model just doesn't work. It's too easy to pirate everything on the Internet, which we encouraged initially because we thought "At least it gets the word out there." But it's too hard financially to make a completely Internet series work of this scale, with this kind of budget.

[1.6] These grand experiments need to be done, of course, in order to test the limits of dissemination and to see how far consumers of content (let's call them fans) will go. The answer, at least for now, seems to be, they won't go so far as to shell out money. As Comscore found, only 38% of In Rainbows downloaders chose to pay, and as Tapping implies, piracy made it hard to make money, even though it had the side benefit of becoming part of the viral fan experience, which in turn led to the TV deal.

[1.7] As a fan-consumer, I feel like I pay plenty for content, but what I'm actually paying for is dissemination: I pay high-speed Internet fees, and I pay for cable TV. I don't pay for TiVo, but in that regard, I find that I am unique among my peers. When you add all this up, hundreds of dollars a month are being spent on accessing content that you don't get to keep. It feels like I'm paying enough; I don't want to also have to pay a couple bucks to download something that I can't watch on my TV and that is poor quality.

[1.8] More needs to be done with cross-platform infrastructure before fan-consumers will shell out. If I could cancel cable (and you could cancel TiVo) and just stick with high-speed Internet, I ought to have enough money to pay a couple bucks for the few TV shows that I actually want to watch and keep, if I could download them to a magic box that would stream the show to my TV without requiring the intermediary step of burning a disk with the item or converting it to another format. If content were available for free to stream, I'd be more willing to do that if I could beam it upstairs to the TV. Although wireless transmitters are available, they're hardly mainstream, and most are designed for music, not TV.

[1.9] I'm watching Big Media's take on all this with interest. When someone (Apple? an open source project?) comes up with a TiVo-like mainstream transmitter, and when someone else comes up with some kind of encoding format that works easily across platforms, Big Media may have to change its ways. Until then, it looks like Sanctuary and In Rainbows showed us a way that isn't going to be the way. Nice try, guys, and don't give up!

New journal announcement and call for papers: Transformative Works and Cultures

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse (kbusse) and Karen Hellekson (khellekson).

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC's aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000–8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory's broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000–7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500–2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item's content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500–2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review AT transformativeworks DOT org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/). Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor AT transformativeworks DOT org).

The call for papers is available as a .pdf download sized for US Letter or European A4. Please feel free to link, download, print, distribute, or post.

SFRA 2008, to be held in Lawrence, Kansas, July 10–13, 2008, will be held jointly with the Campbell Conference at the Holiday Inn Holidome and Convention Center. The Web site for the combined conventions is here: http://www.continuinged.ku.edu/programs/campbell/

At the Web site are hotel information and rates, and registration forms (fees go up after April 30).

Paper and panel proposals should be sent to me at karenhellekson AT karenhellekson DOT com. In addition to a short abstract, I also need to know whether the participant has AV needs.

For the few of you interested in what I teach, which is aerobics, and not, as you might think, anything related to my scholarly interests or my academic degrees, I have created a separate blog, stepkaren, for my choreography and/or class designs. Right now, it's just a few posts with some intermediate Step stuff. I'm doing some big-time breakdowns. This is the result of my trying to figure out choreography that people post and it making no sense.

The blog is mostly there for my own use, because I often make up choreography on the fly and then want to remember it. I will eventually collect all my choreography and aerobics-related links there, to keep everything nice and separate. Still, if you're a Step head, feel free to friend the journal, although I won't read through the friends page there, or really check it at all.

This is cross-posted to my WordPress blog here. Please feel free to comment in either space.

Here's my day job: I copyedit journals and books. I take a manuscript. I run it through a bunch of macros to make it all clean and pretty. I code it for the typesetter. And then I edit it. I think I spend most of my time styling references. It's hard to say. It all kind of blends together, boldface journal numbers, italic journal names, with or without periods, Index Medicus versus Biosis.

When I edit something, I don't really read it. That seems weird but it's better that way. I'm not focusing on content, because that was taken care of, one presumes, during peer review. I'm focusing on grammatical sense, subject-verb agreement, proper styling of P values, reconciliation of references, proper capitalization in display type, tricky italicization in things like restriction enzymes. And I write notes like this to the author: "Figure 3 is reprinted from a copyrighted source. Please ensure that permission paperwork is on file with the production editor." Or, "Song lyrics epigraphs have all been struck. Please approve. If you reinstate, please ensure that you have paid the relevant fees to the copyright holder, and make sure the release paperwork is on file with the production editor."

I know very well that the author had no idea she had no right to reprint Figure 3, because after all, she created it. But it was published elsewhere, and so she doesn't own the copyright. The journal she printed it in does, and they must release it—which they will do for a fee. And I know that although the single lines of popular songs used as epigraphs to head each chapter probably fall within fair use, the publisher doesn't care, as is their prerogative. They don't want to get sued, so they ask me to cut all song lyrics, regardless of length, thus simply avoiding the whole problem.

I think something is wrong with copyright, or the way it's interpreted. I think it's ironic that I'm asked to do something I so fundamentally disagree with. I think that I have to do it anyway.

Here's my fandom life: Not enough time to write, too much heavy-duty revision macro-level beta'ing that really takes quite a bit of time but results in a publishable story, and it makes me proud to see it even if my name isn't on it. A fan archive, three complete virtual seasons, round robins, a mailing list, a fan LJ, some writing awards, betas I love, people who always send me feedback, friends who support me because they just...get it. And the love, oh the love, for a text so rich and so meaningful for me that it has the capacity to reduce me to tears: the canon source, and then that valuable thing that comes after, the community-generated metatext.

Here's my thinky life: I am not an academic. I have a PhD. My specialty is science fiction literature. Meta = fanfic = literary criticism, all of it looping together, the impetus for the one the same as the impetus for the other. I write for money and so sometimes it's hard to write for love, even though I like the pay for the latter better. I published a personal essay about writing fanfic, and I still get notes about it. It was reprinted somewhere. I put together a book proposal and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet was the result. I look around and I see connection, and I have a solely authored book proposal in me about the connection between fandom and articulations of history and historiography, but my strength really isn't in my thinkiness or my meta. It's in my practical knowledge of the publishing field, my ability to execute a complex project on time, and my ability to direct the work of others. That's how I contribute to fandom, and that's how I contribute to scholarship.

Here's why I combined them in OTW: Get a bunch of people together who can actually execute a plan. Do you know how rare that is? I don't really know them and that's okay. I don't share a fandom with most of them, plus my primary fandom is on the lists, not LJ, and I'm always slightly puzzled because I don't have time to follow the metatext that is LJ, so I'm always a little behind. The bunch of people who are in charge seem articulate and smart, and if they say they are going to do something, then they do it. They are trying to create a long-lasting structure on a solid base. They are doing legal-type stuff that is important. And they are doing it all, the entire project, to protect something valuable.

Most people are excited about the Archive Of Our Own, but here's what I'm excited about: an academic journal that welcomes, instead of rejects or overtly mocks, fan studies as a topic. That uses a Creative Commons copyright license so that the author can use that figure again if she wants. That thinks that teeny little snips of song lyrics fall within fair use. That will permit words from television programs or film to appear in print. That has open access, so readers don't need a subscription to read the content. That is online, because more people will see it that way. That permits, even encourages, close readings of film, TV shows, or pieces of fan art, such as fanfic or vids. That has a way for readers to comment so they can engage in dialogue with the writers. And, most importantly, that takes as a given the notion that fans provide something valuable to our culture that ought to be analyzed.

My name is Karen Hellekson. I'm a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, and I'm the coeditor, with Kristina Busse (kbusse), of Transformative Works and Cultures, a new peer-reviewed journal in the field of media studies that is especially interested in work by and about fans.

This post is part of Why I Joined OTW Week. Everything I say here is me, me, me, and I'm not speaking in any official capacity.

The Organization for Transformative Works (on LJ as otw_news) has formally announced the existence of a new peer-reviewed academic journal affiliated with the org, Transformative Works and Cultures. Kristina Busse (kbusse) and I are coediting the journal. Our editorial e-mail address is editor AT transformativeworks DOT org.

The post there explains everything, so I won't repeat any of it here. Do feel free to comment there with any concerns or thoughts.

If you want to volunteer for the Journal project, particularly if you have editorial, copyediting, or CSS/HTML experience, then do please contact the Volunteers committee (volunteers AT transformativeworks DOT org) to get put on the list. When we have a journal job that needs doing, we'll submit the request through Volunteers to get a list of people qualified to do the task. (Please note that for the Journal project, fan pseuds are not used, only professional names.)

I'm very excited about this project, and I welcome the opportunity to work again with Kristina, my coeditor for Fan Fiction and Fan Communities..., as well as the rest of the awesome editorial team.

We wanted that press release out there because we will soon be issuing a call for papers for our first issue. Yes. Stay tuned at otw_news for more info!

SFRA 2008 will be held in Lawrence, Kansas, in conjunction with the Campbell Conference on July 10–13 (Thurs. through Sun.) at the University of Kansas. Individual abstracts or panel presentations comprising three or four papers are invited on any topic, but we particularly welcome abstracts on the conference's broad theme, "Creating, Reading, and Teaching Science Fiction." SFRA also encourages panels and papers analyzing SF in nonliterary media, a recent extension of SFRA's traditional focus.

Abstracts should be sent to Karen Hellekson at karenhellekson AT karenhellekson DOT com.

Abstracts should either be typed into the body of an e-mail or attached as a document. Moderators will be randomly chosen
among the panels that are made up. Important: Presenters who require audiovisual equipment should indicate what they will need.

In addition, a Proceedings volume is planned. Authors are encouraged to drop off their papers at the SFRA meeting to be considered for the printed volume. These papers will be treated as drafts, and papers chosen for inclusion in the volume will be revised before publication.

Proposals are due by Monday, March 31, 2008.

SFRA 2008 has been moved from Dublin to Lawrence, Kansas, to be held in conjunction with the Campbell Conference hosted at the University of Kansas. It will be held July 10–13 (Thursday through Sunday).

The tentative topic is "Teaching, Reading and Creating Science Fiction," and I have agreed to be the academic programmer, so all abstracts should be sent to me (karenhellekson AT karenhellekson DOT com), and my associates and I will group them into panels.

A formal call for papers is being constructed with things like due dates and topic suggestions, but first, the SFRA Executive Committee has to get together hotel and travel info.

Thanks to the folks at the Campbell Conference for saving the day, with particular thanks to mckitterick and chernobylred for their fast setup work.

More later, when everything is official!

SFRA in Dublin has been canceled. I haven't heard official word about when and where the replacement venue will occur, but this is disappointing because it means DH and I must cancel our trip and its planned associated vacation. I am reconsidering ICFA, therefore, and may go to both ICFA and SFRA. I'm currently discussing panel possibilities with colleagues, and once I learn when and where SFRA is going to be, I'll make a decision.

Florida in March does sound awfully good, though.

Craig Jacobsen and I will be coediting the SFRA Review beginning in 2008. We previously coedited this newsletter for a 3-year term back in 1998–2000, and we're happy to be back for a second stint. We have some ideas for new features we'd like to see to broaden the appeal of the publication.

I always love it when journalists post about slash, oh how interesting, slash!—like this interesting article, Kirk/Spock and Dumbledore, on Jim Emerson's Scanners blog. In it, he quotes Jason Mittel's blog (go Jason!) about Dumbledore and the authority of the author.

In this case, the slash pairing that piqued the interest of the writer is Dumbledore and Grindelwald (hello yes), and the blogger's flight of fancy is helped out by Rowling herself, who states the pairing as fact. Emerson seems to think that slash is all AU (?), but he does mention fan fiction and the genre of K/S, which he thoroughly researched with a two-second Google search and references to Salon and Wikipedia.

I always like posts like these. It shows us what outsiders to fandom community think of things like fan fiction, complete with that little bit of titillation (slash OMG! and its corollary, weird fans OMG!) and readings that in the fandom world are simply...odd or wildly simplistic (slash as AU!). And incomplete theorization along with incomplete knowledge of the source text (Emerson admits he hasn't read Rowling's books or seen the films)—well, let me just say that considering the dense mass of meta out there in the fan world, I'm a bit surprised that nobody bothers to cite it.

British writer Doris Lessing, who has written some SF, has won a 2007 Nobel prize for literature. Lessing has been a guest of honor at ICFA and Worldcon. She's one of the few serious writers who is plugged into the SF field and who freely admits she writes in the genre (in contrast to, say, Margaret Atwood).

There is much rejoicing among the participants of the SF lists I'm on. This is generally perceived as an historic moment for mainstream recognition of SF as a serious genre, and the fact that she writes SF is not being presented as a detriment or an aberration.