Was the upgrade worth it? After 2 solid days of attempting to tweak everything to permit functionality and productivity, I’d have to say no. My recommendation: only bother with Windows 8 if it is preinstalled on your new computer or if you have a touchscreen device. Things may get better when there are more Win 8 apps, but right now, the biggest flaw is the system’s inability to play nice with Google. If you’re waiting for official Google apps—keep waiting. Google has announced that for now, they will not be making apps for Win 8.

After 3 solid days of tweaking, I finally have things how I want them. Yet why was it so hard? I googled questions I had and followed the directions once it became clear that I could not possibly work with what came natively with Win 8. The two biggest weaknesses of Win 8 apps are the failure to include any kind of simple, light photo editor (I installed Gimp) and the failure to include software to play CDs/DVDs (I installed VLC Media Player). I had the most trouble getting the Calendar app to work usefully.

When working properly, Calendar will show me upcoming events on its live Start tile. Its biggest weakness is that if you sync it directly with Gcal, it will only sync a single calendar, the main one. There’s a hack for this, but confusingly, Calendar is tied to Mail to update and a sync may not be forced. After several false starts, I managed to sync all five calendars with the Calendar app by pushing all the calendars to my Hotmail account following these instructions. The push works one way: I update my Google calendars in a browser, and it gets mirrored everywhere else. I also have my Google calendar as a shortcut (via Chrome) on the Start menu so I can access it with a single click.

The main criticisms of Win 8 are its nonintuitive Start screen interface and its insistence on making app screens full screen. Both of these are the result of the OS’s optimization for a touchscreen device. There are many shortcuts, both with mouse and keyboard (I can’t assess touch). In general, I have no problem with the interface. The Alt+Tab shortcut still works to flip between screens. The Charms menu (Win+C) is context sensitive, so the function of the five icons differs depending on where you are. Right clicking, dragging, tabbing, using arrow keys with Ctrl or Alt modifiers, hitting return—all of these (mostly) make sense to people used to keyboard shortcuts.

The hardest part was getting Calendar to work. The easiest part was editing the Start screen to look like I wanted. Adding and grouping tiles is simple. I also love the instant search: to boot a program, flip to the Start screen and start typing its name. When the program you want comes up, hit return and it launches. Easy. Another nice surprise: I use a heavily modified version of Word, and although I had to reinstall Office 2010, the system remembered all my Word preferences. My templates and remapped shortcuts were still there.

My Win 8 Start screen

Programs I installed: CCleaner, Chrome (must use as default for Google functionality), Defraggler, Dropbox, Filezilla, Firefox, FreeStudio (file conversion), Gimp, iTunes, MakeMKV, Merriam-Webster, Microsoft Office 2010, Revo Uninstaller, VLC Media Player, Windows Media Player

Free Win 8 apps I installed from the Store: Facebook Touch, Google, Multimedia 8 (does not play DVDs), password manager, Photobucket, Skype, To-Dos

Win 8 tiles I created: Computer, Control Panel, Google Calendar, My Clients, Shutdown, Videos

Built-in Win 8 tiles I kept: Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Messaging, Photos, Social, Weather

Most useless Win 8 tiles: Photos (view only), Music (actually a marketplace), Video (actually a marketplace)

Fan Culture book cover

Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson. 2012. Identity, ethics, and fan privacy. In Fan culture, edited by Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis, 38–56. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

My article is in part 2, “Constructing Identity in an Online, Cross-cultural World.” Here’s the full citation info.

Hellekson, Karen. 2012. Creating a fandom via YouTube: Verbotene Liebe and fansubbing. In New media literacies and participatory popular culture across borders, edited by Bronwyn T. Williams and Amy A. Zenger, 180–92. New York: Routledge.

Alert readers will remember that I wrote a blog post about this topic ages ago, in 2009: Verbotene Liebe, soap operas, fansubbing, and YouTube.

Alas, although I submitted images to go with my essay, in the end they could not be used. So hit the blog link if you want to see pictures and maybe watch a video or two.

A big thank-you to Bronwyn and Amy for being so great to work with! The book turned out beautifully and it’s an honor to be in it.

Naturally you can score this awesome book from Amazon.com.

Topics include fan videos, AMVs, political remix, Lady Gaga “Telephone” videos, queer video, fake movie trailers, anime abridged series, and Star Wars recuts. The issue features interviews with Bradcpu, Desiree D’Alessandro, Diran Lyons, Eric Faden, and Nina Paley. And a special Multimedia section features curated lists of videos (AMVs and political remix) as well as an exploration of the queer; and Alexandra Juhasz explores the boundaries of online writing/presentation with a YouTour.

“Oh Internet (A Vidding/Remix Romance),” by Julie Levin Russo (2012).

io9.com has a “making of” feature for the opening credits, “An Exclusive Look at the Making of Dragon Tattoo’s Stunning Titles,” that interviews one of the creators, Tim Miller. It’s worth a read to see what the creators had in mind—which, in my book, has little to do with what I perceive the credits as being about, because I thought the credits transcended the text of the books.

If you’re interested in the song, it’s a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” performed by Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Karen O, and can be purchased from Amazon.com.

Regarding the film itself: it doesn’t live up to the hype of the credits. The credits imply a cyberromp through the main character’s head, even as it foreshadows all the events of the entire trilogy through imagery. But the movie isn’t about what the credits are about. The credits are all SF; the film is a straight-up thriller, and any engagement with technology isn’t handled on the level of meaning that the credits promise.

I greatly preferred the Swedish-language version, which is far more compelling on every level. If you haven’t read the books and haven’t seen the Swedish-language films, then I think you can safely watch this movie and like it; but otherwise, it spends a lot of time on the mystery at the expense of some of the complexity that made the other texts so dense.

Because I’ve been doing lots of books, I’ve been writing lots of style sheets. One benefit of journal work is, there’s one style sheet, you edit to it, and you’re done. It’s prescriptive because the papers are supposed to all match. With books, not so much. I have to construct a style sheet for each book. Sometimes this involves a crash course in, say, the technical aspects of filmmaking, with attendant jargon and terms.

I used to construct style sheets for a living, back when I worked in house, and I can knock them out like a champ. For book work, the resources I use are, in order, the house style book; Chicago Manual of Style (CMS); and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (MW). (Although I edit in the humanities, none of my clients uses MLA style. I’m thus not actually sure why MLA style exists. I’m sure some people use MLA style–like, probably the MLA. I just don’t know any press personally that uses it. I think of it as a style used by students, not publishing professionals.*)

The style guides provided by the presses are usually quite minimal, but they contain valuable info. For example, one of the presses I work for asks that all ranges be full. Good to know! Similarly, house style sheets state the style the documentation ought to be in. Usually they follow CMS with their own tweaks. For example, not a one of my university press clients has moved to the use of postal codes for states in bibliographic contexts; they all want standard state abbreviations. House style will also specify how to do dates (is it 00 Month 2000 or Month 00, 2000, or do they not care–just pick one?), time, ordinals, and the like. One of my clients provides me with a very useful list of names of theorists and philosophers in literary studies, so I know, for example, to add haceks to Zizek’s name, or how to spell “Georges Bataille.”

Although CMS is currently in its 16th edition, all my clients are still using the 15th, and some are still on the 14th, if their documentation is anything to go by. Luckily, CMS hasn’t changed all that much in the Greater Scheme–overlooking Documentation II’s ill-advised changes in the 16th edition, of course. I impose CMS style most importantly for documentation, but also for number style, styling of percentages, singular possessives ending in s–in fact, anything not mentioned in the house style guide.

That leaves my best friend, MW. I spend a lot of time looking up words, and actually the TERMS list comprises comprises much of the style sheet. When editing, I have MW† and a browser with Amazon.com up at all times, so I can look up words and people’s names. MW is so endemic in the industry that the production notes that go with a book manuscript will specify the terms that the press has decided will violate MW. A book I’m editing right now wants “website” and not “Web site,” for example.

If I look back at all the books I’ve edited in the last few months, my impression is stolid old-fashioned-ness. With periods in abbreviations like U.S. and standard state abbreviations instead of postal codes in documentation, the overall impression is not of sleek modernity but of stolid, reassuring authority. This makes perfect sense for university presses.

Here are the sections of the style sheets I write: listing of sources consulted; general style; number style; technical/statistical style; notes style, with examples; references style, with examples; style for figure captions; style for tables; and TERMS list.

Notes

* Part of my reasoning for MLA style being for students prepping papers, and not for actual print publication, is that their style guide doesn’t address the finer points of styling and typography. A perfectly reasonable question, like “Does MLA style use en dashes to hyphenate open compounds?” cannot be answered by perusing the MLA stylebook.

† Although I could use MW online, I usually don’t, because it’s graphics heavy, slow to load. and annoying. I purchased MW in hardcover when it came out, and it came with a CD to load it onto my computer. That’s the version I use.

“Is it normal,” he asked in a small voice, “to feel stupid after getting an edited manuscript back?”

Answer: Yes. Why, yes.

The problem is when these feelings manifest as temper tantrums, often directed at me, the lowly copyeditor. As someone employed in publishing, my take on this whole writing thing is, just write, and let a professional worry about making it awesome for print. If an author feels stupid (and who wouldn’t, after they see a redline where literally every line has a change?), they tend to get testy, and I have seen my share of really nasty notes. Usually it’s a knee-jerk reaction along the lines of “OMG you changed my WORDS.” What escapes these testy authors is (and this point is made in the article) someone very carefully read their entire text and analyzed it. That is time-consuming, requires real expertise, and is done out of respect for the author and the text.

This is why I hate being reviled. It’s not just OMG you changed my WORDS. It’s OMG you missed my POINT, or OMG you changed my words for NO REASON, or OMG you are so RANDOM, or OMG why is this EVEN IMPORTANT. It’s rarely OMG you saved my ASS, or OMG thank you for CATCHING THAT, or OMG you FACT-CHECKED. I still remember one author who wrote notes so nasty that I actually cried, and he reverted every single one of my edits back to the original. Every single one. So I was paid to edit, then unedit, an entire book. I had been impressed by the sheer number of prestigious presses he’d published with, but after this experience, I could see why. Nobody would work with him twice.

The difference between copyediting and, say, grading papers, or giving feedback to an advisee, is that it’s not really supposed to be a learning opportunity for the author, and authors reviewing their first copyedit don’t seem to get this, because I am not going to have an intellectual conversation with them about their article or book. I rarely write explanatory notes as I edit, unless it’s something the press specifically requested and I won’t/can’t honor a request to revert. I’m not there to teach authors how to use “due to,” or to explain why I edited every single instance of “using” that began a sentence. I’m not there to argue the merits of the serial comma that I imposed throughout; the press wants it, the press gets it, let’s move on. I’ve seen copyedited manuscripts where the copyeditor writes explanatory notes to the author, but they always come across as condescending—and see above re. making the author feel stupid.

This is all to say that when I see irate notes, sure, I get a pang of self-righteous anger: doesn’t the author see that I am trying to save her from herself? But ultimately, the author’s text is the author’s text, and she can change back whatever she wants. I don’t know how to say this nicely, so here it is: I really don’t care. Authors need not explain or justify. It’s their field, it’s their book, it’s their ideas. While I’m reading, I’m learning, and I’m vaguely engaged, but mostly I’m styling and reconciling references, and fact-checking online because it’s easier than writing a query, and wondering whether the spelling Stephen or Steven is correct. I hand it back to the author or I deliver it to the press, and I promptly forget all about it. So these dramatic OMG feelings and notes…honey, I just don’t have time for that.

Let me look at my statistics for a sec. Let’s say May 2011, chosen randomly. For my biggest client, I edited 855 pages of copy. I also edited one book (318 pages) and several manuscripts each for three other journals; I’m not going to count those pages up, but I would estimate it to be maybe 200 pages. So let’s call it…a whole ton of copy. Dudes, I am a frackin’ machine.

So to the poor trembling authors who feel inadequate, I have this to say. Yes. I changed your WORDS. If I edited a sentence and changed its meaning to something you didn’t intend, there need be no drama. Don’t even bother feeling hurt or writing a dramatic note, because for me, it’s all in a day’s work. Just change it—but keep in mind that I am no fool, and although it’s perfectly possible that I made a mistake, perhaps you ought to consider that your writing was unclear. If I made a change and you don’t understand why, but it makes sense, then just leave it, because I had a reason, even if you don’t know what it was.

I’m sure every author has a story about the stupid copyeditor who altered things willy-nilly and it took just forever to correct. I have stories too. But it boils down to this. It’s the copyeditor’s job to edit. It’s the author’s job to check over and approve it. If authors find something wrong and change it, well, um, that’s how it works. That’s supposed to happen.

Although I can advise authors that there’s no point in feeling stupid, that still doesn’t make them feel any less stupid when they get a marked-up edited manuscript. So my advice is, let the process do its work: write, revise, submit, revise, copyedit, review copyedit, review galleys, proofread. See how many steps there are? There’s a reason for that. There’s no need for drama, unprofessional notes, anger, or angst. Maybe this book is your life’s work, but it’s just a job for me. I see a lot of copy, I edit a lot of books, and I don’t think you’re stupid. But then again, why would you care what I think?

Just write and don’t worry about it too much, because there’s a whole process to make that writing awesome. That’s all any of us want.

For those of you unaware of DOIs, which remain relatively rare in the humanities but which are used extensively in the sciences, it’s a scheme meant to permit URLs to persist. Instead of a “permanent” URL pointing to a journal article, book, or other element, a DOI is assigned. The DOI is included with the publication so scholars can cite it. Then, in theory, someone who wants to access the article can just type in the DOI and be taken the article’s primary page. This can be the article itself, but more commonly it is a summary page, with citation info, abstract, and the like, plus perhaps an opportunity to purchase the article (example here). Then, when a Web site is totally restructured, as it inevitably is, the journal just deposits new URLs associated with the DOIs, and magically, the DOIs continue to hit.

According to the note from DOI, they had hoped or assumed that the doi: prefix would be automatically rendered by browsers to take you right to the DOI, so you could just copy or hotlink “doi:10.3983/twc.2011.0271″ in a browser, and you’d be taken right to the correct summary page. This hasn’t happened, though, and bowing to the inevitable, DOI has given their blessing for the DOIs’ related URLs to be used instead. The DOI URL prefix “http://dx.doi.org/” simply replaces the “doi:” part. I can see DOI’s logic in preferring to hope that the “doi:” would be made to automatically hit, because now “http://dx.doi.org/” is going to have to persist. The “doi:” styling also has the beauty of being immediately differentiated from a URL, which is good because DOIs and URLs are different things.

This new styling may take a while to trickle down to common usage. For example, the latest (16th) edition of the Chicago Manual of Style provides styling information that uses the doi:10.3983/twc.2011.0271 protocol, and it’s much, much easier to point authors to a published style than to make exceptions. Oh, the irony! No sooner does Chicago get on board than DOI permits this new style.

Meanwhile, for those of you taking seriously various styling guidelines requesting DOIs, you may look up a small number of them at CrossRef.org’s DOI Lookup. You may also sign up for an account to do automated batch queries.

I’ll be talking about the “promise and peril” of transition in terms of the humanities’ rocky move to online publication in terms of scholarly journals. This topic interests me because I am employed in the publishing industry, plus I’m an editor of a journal, so I have to deal with a lot of behind-the-scenes copyright and production stuff that has implications for presentation and dissemination.

My panel, Publishing in Transition, is on the very last day of the conference, Sunday, May 15, from 10:45a to 12:15p. The other people on the panel are Kathleen Fitzpatrick (who will be talking about books, as opposed to journals), Hanno Biber and Evelyn Breitenede (online corporate texts), and Kristin Anderson-Terpstra and Casey Brienza (manga distribution in the United States).

Here’s my abstract:

The transition of scholarly discourse online is proving a bumpy one. Although some radical new modes of content vetting and delivery are emerging and “digital humanities” has become a buzzword, scholarly work online in the humanities and social sciences is not accorded the same prestige compared to journals that use a print-only or dual print-online model, despite the obvious advantages of access and use of embedded (multi)media. Yet these fears also reveal sites of possible renegotiation of the academic model in a way that will help scholars and scholarly discourse. Publishing in the humanities and the social sciences needs to follow the lead of the sciences, which were early adopters of moving and organizing content online: physics pioneered the online preprint; ClinicalTrials.gov registers trials and provides instructions for investigators; and journals in many disciplines publish online-only supplemental materials, such as data sets and online videos. Further, Creative Commons copyright and open access models have much to offer. All these ideas may be usefully co-opted by the digital humanities.

A draft of the full paper is up on MiT7′s site. Ironically, one concern of mine was that putting up full text would render any text I might try to publish about this topic unpublishable (because it had already appeared), so I wrote informally and didn’t cite exhaustively, so that any rewrite will be substantially different and could be considered. Hmmm… sounds like an excellent topic of discussion for this conference!

The book is published by Lexington Press (a Rowman & Littlefield imprint) and is available in hardcover and in an electronic version. You can order it right from Lexington or, of course, from Amazon. The complete table of contents is up at Lexington’s site.