Karen Hellekson

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).

...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? )

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

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.

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.