Karen Hellekson

Transformative Works and Cultures No. 3 has been released right on schedule.

The table of contents is here, and OTW's announcement about it is here.

This issue has some great topics: filk and wrock, quilting, Lost, Law & Order: SVU, a couple items on the LOTR fan film The Hunt for Gollum, an essay about the troubling aspects of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, an essay about gift culture (a particular interest of mine)—well, just go read the issue yourself, because it's all this and more.

We'd love it if you used the software interface to write comments to the authors. Remember, the issue is fully open access, so feel free to copy, paste, transform...it's all good.

At my WordPress blog: Two very different fan productions—a quick run-down of two transformative fan artworks you ought to review: The Hunt for Gollum and Battlestar Redactica.

Today was e-waste day at the hardware store, so DH and I took the opportunity to bring some e-waste on over, including my old Toshiba laptop (which is completely, utterly dead), still in its little case, with all the cords. We also brought in an obsolete Gateway tower and a bunch of big, heavy dead batteries. But seeing the Toshiba brought back a flood of memories! Its little black case...its trackball...its incredible denseness for its size.

The e-waste site was hoppin'. I wish I'd thought to bring my camera there. It was held in the parking lot of a hardware store, and they had set it up so you had to wend your way around, all orderly and neatly queued, so the guys could unload your stuff. They had a table for donations as you rounded the corner. We obediently handed over $10—a lovely deal for getting rid of what is basically toxic waste.

The e-waste site had huge towering stacks of all sorts of items, from old towers just like mine to piles of boxy CRT monitors to broken toaster ovens and microwaves. The workers there were stacking the items atop large boxes that acted as a base, and then wrapping the entire thing in what looked like giant sheets of cellophane tape. It was, in short, super cool. DH knew one of the workers (a physics prof), who revealed that interest in E-Waste Day was insane. A huge semi had come and unloaded all kinds of crap, and the guy was just bringing in his second load when we left.

I honestly can't remember when I got this laptop. I remember writing my PhD exams on it, so it must have been in the mid-1990s. At first I purchased WordPerfect for Windows 3.1. But that program sucked. I ended up throwing a fit and they let me exchange it for WordPerfect for DOS 6.0. It was no 5.1, but then again, what is? I loaded in both programs from 3-inch floppies.

Back in the distant mists of time, when this laptop was current, I evoked Windows manually from the command line. I did lots of stuff with non-Windows DOS programs. I did all my file maintenance, like renaming files and moving or copying them, at the DOS command prompt.

Here's a short pictoral ode to my trusty Toshiba laptop, which DH used long after I had to upgrade (clients and their zany expectations!). We used it until it died a sad, slow death.

( Read more... )

I suppose this might become a collector's item, if it isn't one already. Perhaps some lucky e-waste worker will take it home and make it his. That would be okay with me.

Farewell, laptop friend! You served me well for a very long time...and DH, even longer.

Madeline Ashby has started a blog that aims to round up details about research going on in fandom. Interested in seeing what sorts of questionnaires researchers are using? Wondering whether someone else already taken that great idea and started a project? Fandom Research wants to be the go-to place to answer these questions. It's early days yet for the site, but the more people who contribute, the more useful the site will be.

Today I contributed a guest post entitled Fandom research methods that discusses, among other things, AOIR's ethics guide, which is the de facto guide for people working on research in human subjects via the Internet in the social sciences. While writing it, I was reminded that the impetus of many guidelines is to prevent the subjects of study from harm, and to ensure that they understand exactly what will be done with the responses they provide.

I've written an essay entitled Verbotene Liebe, Soap Operas, Fansubbing, and YouTube and posted it on my WordPress blog.

Do go read it and comment there if you like!

Sequential Tart's Suzette Chan has just published an interview with acafan Catherine Tosenberger entitled "Supernatural love: Catherine Tosenberger on Sam and Dean's transformative love story."

Tosenberger published an essay on Supernatural in the first issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) entitled "'The epic love story of Sam and Dean': Supernatural, queer readings, and the romance of incestuous fan fiction," and it is among the most viewed articles on the site: 11,020 views as I write this. She is also guest editing a special Supernatural issue of TWC entitled "Saving People, Hunting Things," planned for spring 2010 (call for papers here, and fannish meta is absolutely welcome).

In ST's interview, Tosenberger talks a bit about TWC and why it fills an important niche, and she discusses fan engagement with the show. Her call for papers for TWC's special SPN issue is linked too! She speaks generally about such things as fan fiction, so the article is a good, informed overview of topics of interest to people interested more generally in fan studies, especially those just entering the field.

But for most of the interview, Tosenberger discusses specific things about SPN, such as characterization, fan engagement (and yes, she touches on J2 RPS), and story arcs, including a season 4 arc that dealt head-on with what she calls the main characters' "emotionally incestuous relationship." The show's tight focus on the two main characters provides an emotional center to the show:

When you talk about that externalization, that shows up on Supernatural in the monsters and the ghosts they fight, but it's always commenting back on Sam and Dean's own relationship. The concept of two guys who are in some way, shape or form isolated from the rest of society and have to depend on each other is a really common factor in a lot of classic slash fandom, that sense of isolation and the way it can break down the traditional masculine heterosexual barriers. [...] But Sam and Dean? It ratchets it up several notches: they are each other's entire universes.

The show's big success, I think, comes from the dual nature of the storytelling: in addition to compelling individual stories that are themselves arranged into season-long arcs, it is also emotionally rich and complex. If a story doesn't work on the level of story, then the satisfaction that watchers gain from the show's emotional aspect may suffice.

ST's interview came at the perfect time: last Thursday's episode, 4.18 "The Monster at the End of This Book," was a fabulous meta episode, with the first 9 or 10 minutes of the show being about fan reaction to the series. It directly addresses Sam girls, Dean girls, slash fanfic (Dean: "What's a slash fan?" Sam: "As in Sam slash Dean. Together.") edging into Wincest (Dean: "They do know we're brothers, right?" Sam: "Doesn't seem to matter."), and the brothers' emotional intimacy.

I am convinced that at about 9:15p last Thursday night, that sharp keening noise heard up and down the East Coast was the squee of fangirls, exclaiming aloud in utter joy that SPN knew all about them, and valued SPN fandom enough to write it into the ep as homage and not as freak show. (It doesn't hurt that we get to see Sam and Dean pretend to be fanboys.) The episode is also intriguing because it's one of those metaepisodes, where someone is writing existence into being (you can read a spoilery plot synopsis here). I've seen this trope used over and over, and I always like its self-reflexivity, but SPN does it one better by cleverly embedding it into the show's angel–demon milieu...and by talking about fans OMG, even giving a fangirl a face and voice: that of Keegan Connor Tracy. But this isn't just any fangirl: it's a fangirl who is fan while also being producer and gatekeeper. She has power by having something Sam and Dean need, and she isn't going to give it away to anyone unworthy.

In addition, Entertainment Weekly's latest issue, dated April 10, 2009, has a SPN article. The article focuses more on season 4's angel–demon arc, which resulted in a 13% audience increase (30), and notes that executive producer Eric Kripke, not to mention the two leads, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, want to end the show after 5 seasons. Although the emotional bond between the brothers is a hugely important aspect of the show, it's clear—and EW even comes out and says this in general spoilers about the season 4 finale—that the two of them are going to do battle. This article is not as respectful to fans as I might like, choosing instead to go the extreme route so common in mainstream journalism: the article provides an example of a stalkery fan who conned her way onto the set, and it says of the whole incest fan fiction thing, "There's also a unique and very creepy subset of romantic fan fiction dedicated to siblings Sam [...] and Dean [...] called 'Wincest'—the less said about it the better" (30).

Actually not, as Tosenberger's interview makes plain. The more said about that, the better, if you ask me: the whole notion of Wincest begs for analysis—like this remark by Tosenberger:

This show is putting the incest really front and centre. In the first two seasons, whenever they referenced the Sam/Dean subtext, it was always in this jokey way. It was always, a-ha-ha, the boys are being taken for a gay couple: isn't that funny? It was always there, but it was always played for laughs. But this season, it's starting to get deadly serious. "Sex and Violence" didn't play off the connections between Dean's love for Sam, and how every single other model of love that we saw the siren invoking was romantic, sexual love. It just played it absolutely straight-faced and very tragic and miserable.

I had to be dragged into SPN kicking and screaming, but now that I'm caught up, I'm with Tosenberger and the other fans of the show: TV is the best genre for densely layered, emotionally rich, long-form storytelling, and these texts show us that it's possible to link storytelling with nuanced, changeable human characters. Thanks to ST for running the interview, and thanks to Tosenberger for taking on the role of acafan ambassador.

Transformative Works and Cultures No. 2 has been released! Please visit our special Games issue here.

The next issue will be a general (that is to say, unthemed) issue.

Calls for papers have been released for two special issues: "Saving People, Hunting Things," about the popular TV show Supernatural (spring 2010), guest edited by Catherine Tosenberger (CFP here); and "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (spring 2011), on the topic of history, guest edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein (CFP here).

I'm pleased to say I was asked to sit on the committee/jury for the 2009 Philip K. Dick award, which is given for the best novel originally published in paperback. It's given annually at Norwescon. If you're interested in past winners, Wikipedia has a list here.

...is here.

On this date in 1938, as a Halloween treat, the Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast their version of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. The rest, as you know, is history.

This audio drama is in the public domain and may be obtained here. Check it out! Enjoy!

Is there Life on Mars?

My long-awaited (ha!) analysis of the US version of the 2006–2007 UK series.

Okay, I had a Blue Screen of Death today when I shut down before I rushed off to teach. And yesterday and this morning, when I booted, my trusty computer cycled repeatedly through the missed startup—you know, that black screen with white text and bars, that says things like, "Start with the last Windows settings that worked," or "Press this key combination to start in Safe mode." And for the last few months, my computer has been booting very slowly, with an alarmingly long pause in the middle of the boot, during which my monitor's green "on" button flashes amber, to "off."

Danger, Will Robinson! The computer has been running continuously since April 2004 and I think it may have had enough! Still, it was a good run, thanks to my policy of buying with growth in mind, and it ain't dead yet.

Of course, being a smart girl, this is me mirroring the content of my hard drive to my external hard drive. This is me backing up my in-progress files to a memory stick. This is me zipping and e-mailing myself client files so I can find them on keyword searches. This is me writing down a list of all the software on my machine, including that zany application that lets me view comic books (CDisplay), snip audio files (mp3DirectCut), record audio from a microphone (Audacity), and edit/view HTML/XML files (CSE HTML Validator v8).

And this is me not wanting to get anywhere near Vista, and thus researching a Mac! Which is the reason for this post:

( Should I switch to Mac? )

Me and Mike in Danforth Chapel in Lawrence, Kansas

Thanks to MA for scanning the photo, which I snagged off Facebook.

Joan Winston, "Trek" Superfan, Dies at 77

This wonderful obituary, which appears in the New York Times, of a die-hard Star Trek fan does a great job of explaining the early days of Trek media fandom. Winston was one of the classic BNFs, and she gave unstintingly of her time to help media fandom come into its own. She helped shape the terrain, and those of us who enjoy media fandom have her in part to thank.

I'm glad to see one of us acknowledged so kindly, and with so much respect for her passion.

This is cross-posted to WordPress here.

Transformative Works and Cultures No. 1 released by fan as .pdf

Let me cut to the chase: the entire issue of TWC No. 1 is available here as a .pdf (5107 KB, 126 pages). Comment with a thank-you note when you take it. (EDIT TO ADD: File also available here on Megaupload.)

Here's the full story! No sooner did the editorial team release Transformative Works and Cultures No. 1 when...it got transformed.

elfwreck has kindly turned the entire issue into one big .pdf. Her reason for doing it: she's on dial-up. She felt the keen need for a version she could download all at once and read offline in hard copy. Because she has some mad layout skills, she .pdf'd that baby up and made it available to all.

The .pdf is a two-column rendering of the entire issue. elfwreck thoughtfully ran it by me and my coeditor, Kristina (kbusse), even though she didn't have to, because reproducing the work in its entirety falls within the Creative Commons copyright license we use. After a little tweaking and a little back-and-forthing, elfwreck came up with the final version that she's now making freely available. She's also considering making single articles available as .pdfs, but she hasn't completed this task yet.

So TWC been transformed from online to print, which I think is great. So often it goes the other way! The editorial team had talked about releasing a .pdf version at the same time as the .html version, but we didn't for a bunch of reasons, the most important of which is, we really think that because we want multimedia, we have to be online. If we put up official .pdfs, then we lose the ability to, for example, embed an Imeem vid, and, on top of that, everybody will treat the .pdf as the more correct version, simply because it's print, whether we want them to or not.

But this kind of transformation and fan sharing is what we were thinking of when we began theorizing the journal—when we began thinking about what we'd like to see, and why. Basically we wanted to incorporate aspects of fan practice into the academic publishing model, particularly aspects related to transformation, the theme of the journal. For example, we wanted fans to be able to freely take the articles and do something with them, because they do that with media and other texts. Thus we copyrighted under Creative Commons, which permits remixing and reposting. And we wanted people to be able to leave comments on the essays themselves, because it parallels fan activity in blog spaces like LiveJournal, so we chose Open Journal Systems software, which has a commenting feature. This transforms a monolithic piece of writing into a conversation.

Big thanks to elfwreck for not only taking the time to do this, but for permitting me to link to her post to widen her audience for the .pdf. We welcome any other transformations of TWC! Have at it!

TWC No. 1 released

I'm pleased to announce that Transformative Works and Cultures has just released its debut issue. My coeditor, Kristina Busse (kbusse), and I are incredibly excited about it because we think there is some excellent scholarship in this issue, plus some great personal essays that help the issue range widely. We want academics and fans to meet in this space, and we're hopeful that this issue will generate a lot of interest and discussion.

We encourage visitors to sign up for a user ID, so we can better track our "circulation." In addition, it's possible to comment on the essays, so we hope readers will do that to engage the authors in dialogue.

One thing Kristina and I are particularly excited about is the open access nature of the journal—that means it's available to all online, for free. I'm all over that for several reasons. Those of you who have heard me speak (passionately) at academic conventions about the publishing industry will know that I think that the print model is on its way out, and the prestige of print is not long for this world. I'm watching it happen in the sciences (I'm employed in the scientific, technical, and medical publishing industry), and it's going to bleed out into the humanities and social sciences next. It's a natural fit for TWC: this issue has embedded Imeem vids, screen caps, and stills. In color. Try that in print!

The open access thing was particularly driven home to me while I was fact-checking some bibliographical items in this issue. I knew this already, but I discovered anew (because I do not have an academic appointment and thus don't have mad library privilegez, which may have let me bypass some of this), that a huge amount of content is locked down, even for stuff that is, frankly, old. So you want to discover the page range of that article? Ha ha ha! We're not telling! It's a secret! To learn that info, you can buy the article! For a mere $30! Yeah, right.

TWC is going to be under intense scrutiny for a couple reasons. One is the whole audience = acafan thing. Academics will scrutinize the issue for rigor, and fans will scrutinize it for accessibility. (Can the twain meet? We think so, obviously, but let's find out.) But it's also going to be under scrutiny because anybody can read the essays for free—no passwords, no fees, no nothing.

Particularly for fans, who are keen sharers of info, it's hard to believe that this model is actually revolutionary, but in the academic realm, it really, really is. The essays are going to be read and cited widely not only because they are damn good and add important things to scholarship and meta discussion, but because users can actually access them without traveling to the library stacks to find a printed issue that they can photocopy. Sure, we're going to get puzzled generalist readers along with our target acafan audience, but you know what? I actually think that it's a good thing to widen the audience. Welcome to fan studies, everybody!

Press release

The first issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC; http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) was released on September 15, 2008. This open-access online multimedia fan studies journal publishes scholarly essays, personal essays, and book reviews. TWC is published under the umbrella of the nonprofit fan advocacy group Organization for Transformative Works (http://transformativeworks.org/), and although its audience will primarily be acafans (academic fans), its scope ranges widely with the aim of providing a forum for fannish voices, academic or not.

"One important aspect of the journal is its open-access nature," Karen Hellekson, coeditor of TWC, commented. "It will be available for anyone to read, without any subscription restrictions. Plus it's online, so the articles can use hotlinks and embed videos. It's really time to move beyond the print model, so it's exciting that we're able to do that." She points to Francesca Coppa's essay, "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding," as an example of an essay that uses embedded media. "It's got screen caps from fan vids, plus embedded links to video, all to support her argument. It really explores the range of what multimedia has to offer." The issue also contains an audio feature, presented by Bob Rehak, with two downloadable recordings of a discussion held at the 2008 Console-ing Passions academic conference.

The first issue ranges widely to showcase TWC's interdisciplinary scope. For example, the political realm is dealt with by Abigail De Kosnik in "Participatory Democracy and Hillary Clinton's Marginalized Fandom," which applies fan theoretical models to contemporary Democratic political behavior. "This is a great example of fan studies being used to inform the political," Kristina Busse, TWC coeditor, pointed out. "The field ranges so widely, and I don't think people realize how applicable the scholarship is in other arenas." For example, pedagogy and writing is handled by Bram Stoker award-winning horror writer Michael A. Arnzen, whose essay, "The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory," uses a classroom writing exercise revolving around horror texts to emphasize the central importance of transformation in writing, and Madeline Ashby's "Ownership, Authority, and the Body: Does Antifanfic Sentiment Reflect Posthuman Anxiety?" uses specific anime films as metaphor for the role of women's writing online.

Several interviews also appear in the issue. The TWC editors interviewed Henry Jenkins, whose groundbreaking work in fan studies is required reading by all fan studies scholars, and the three members of the Audre Lorde of the Rings, a conglomerate of academics, artists, and activists. Veruska Sabucco interviews one member of the Italian writing collective known as Wu Ming to talk about Wu Ming's activist project and fan writing in terms of collective authorship, copyrights concerns, and popular culture. And fan voices are also heard in the Symposium section, including an essay by the founder of the Fanfic Symposium, Rebecca Lucy Busker, whose "On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse" focuses on fannish meta discourses and the particular ways LiveJournal's interface has shaped and affected style and content.

"This is a strong issue that we hope will invite many more diverse contributions," Busse said. The second issue of TWC, which will focus on games and gaming, is scheduled for March 15, 2009, publication; No. 3 will appear September 15, 2009, and will feature more general submissions.

This press release may also be downloaded as a .pdf here. The call for papers for No. 2 is available as an .rtf file here. Do disseminate widely!

I found this today in my planner, where I've kept it for...let's see...9 years. It's getting faded, so I thought I'd better save it by scanning it.

It's a job description, written on a sticky note with a purple V-Ball Extra Fine pen—the best pen for copyediting. All of us at the printing house where I worked were required to write our job descriptions out, and this is what my colleague, Matt, turned in to me.


Matt's job description

...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!