TWC No. 3 released

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.

Catherine Tosenberger talks about “Supernatural”

This is cross-posted to my LJ here.

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.

Female fan culture and intellectual property

I’m delighted to say that I’ll be presenting at the the Sixth Annual IP/Gender Conference, “Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property,” held in collaboration with American University’s Center for Social Media, at the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, DC. The conference runs Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24. More information about the conference is available here.

My topic is “Intellectual Property, Transformation, and Academic Journals,” and I’ll be talking about how Transformative Works and Cultures deals with intellectual property in terms of the copyright the journal uses and the way the journal handles things like embedded videos, screenshots, and photographs. TWC bucks many established trends in the publishing industry, from our insistence on open access to our Web-only presentation, and I’ll be talking about why that is important and interesting—not only for access in the field of media studies, but also as a way to shake off the print-first mind-set so prevalent in the publishing industry.

Registration information is available here.

The evening of April 23 begins the conference, with a showing of multimedia works by conference attendees. On April 24, there will be a full day of presentations and discussions. Here is the listing of those presenting:

Ann Bartow, University of South Carolina | Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College | Casey Fiesler, Vanderbilt University | Melissa Tatum, University of Arizona | Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa |Tisha Turk, University of Minnesota | Ann Shalleck, Washington College of Law | Laura Murray, Queen’s University | Jordan Gilbertson, University of La Verne, College of Law| Karen Hellekson, Transformative Works and Cultures | Peter Jaszi, Washington College of Law | Kristina Busse, University of South Alabama | Abigail De Kosnik, University of California, Berkeley | Zahr Said Stauffer, University of Virginia School of Law

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!

Transformative Works and Cultures copyright clarification

What copyright is Transformative Works and Cultures using?

TWC is copyrighting under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

In brief, everyone is free to reprint or remix, with attribution, without obtaining specific permission, as long as the original publication info is attributed and/or hotlinked back. We chose a noncommercial license because we think that enough people are making money off fan labor. If people are going to do so, we figure at least they ought to tell us, so we can tell the author.

Practically speaking, what does that copyright mean for the authors who publish in TWC?

It means that anybody can post full text of the articles, with attribution, as long as they don’t make money. Authors may therefore repost the entire content to their blog or Web site after TWC has been published. Likewise, random people can repost full text without restriction. As long as they attribute it properly, it’s all good.

If people want to make money off the text, perhaps by anthologizing the essay in an edited volume, then they must ask. This includes the author, because once an article appears in TWC, TWC owns the copyright.

We plan to grant permission to anyone who requests reprint, regardless of who they are (the author or not), without asking for money. We basically just want to know, so we can inform the author. If the author does not want the article reprinted, we are obliged to disregard the author’s wishes and permit the publication to go forward, as per our stated reprint policy (“Such permission is routinely granted for free”). We do this in the spirit of open access.

Why is TWC retaining copyright, not the author?

The journal retaining copyright is standard in academic journal publishing. Everyone in the industry understands it. We’re thus in line with general practice. Production editors at presses seeking reprint permission will automatically come to TWC, not the author. Requesting payment for reprints is one way that academic journals make money. However, TWC, because it is associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit organization, and because we want to retain the spirit of open access, will never ask for money to reprint articles.

Our main reason is a purely practical one: TWC retains copyright to protect its ability to grant reprint permission in case the author disappears.

Further, we are committed to open access. If we released copyright to the author, the author could choose to abrogate that by refusing to grant reprint permission. This is not in line with TWC’s mission and goals, which are focused on the free dissemination of ideas.

What about reproduction of copyrighted or trademarked material in TWC?

As part of the essays we will print, TWC will publish screencaps, manips, original art based on copyrighted or trademarked characters, short vids, and other artworks based on copyrighted material.

As TWC’s Web site notes in the section on Online Submissions,

We believe images, including images altered by an artist to create a derivative artwork, and song lyrics may appear in TWC under fair use under U.S. copyright law. Such images and lyrics are fair use because:
1. They are lower in resolution and quality than the original.
2. They do not limit the copyright owners’ distribution rights.
3. They are being used in the context of academic analysis in a manner that contributes meaningfully to our culture.
4. They represent only a tiny fraction of the whole artwork.
5. They are hosted by the OTW’s servers, and the OTW is a nonprofit organization.

This reading of fair use means that we will permit reproduction of images that most other scholarly journals would never consider. We hope that this will inspire authors who have resisted writing such works because they knew they would basically be unpublishable.

If authors wish to reprint untransformed copyrighted texts that are not artworks, such as bar graphs or charts that were originally published in another academic journal, the author is responsible, as is standard in the industry, for contacting the journal to obtain permission, paying any fees, and providing the TWC editors with copies of the relevant paperwork.

New journal CFP: Transformative Works and Cultures

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 and Karen Hellekson.

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.

Why I joined OTW

This is cross-posted to my LiveJournal 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 LiveJournal (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, 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.

Announcement of new fan studies journal

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 (on LJ as 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!