Obituary: Joan Winston

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.

TWC No. 1 transformed

This is cross-posted to LJ 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, 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

This is cross-posted to my LJ blog here.

I’m pleased to announce that Transformative Works and Cultures has just released its debut issue. My coeditor, Kristina Busse, 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!