Currently browsing

March 2011

[META] Persistence and DOIs

When TWC’s No. 6 (History issue) came out a few weeks ago, we had a not-so-minor snafu: all the hotlinks in the press release were broken. The reason? We had (cleverly, we thought) drafted the press release using DOIs instead of URLs, and we had problems with the issue’s DOI deposit.

DOIs, or digital object identifiers, are a way to pretend that Web items are permanent. Web sites change so frequently that links continually get broken. DOIs aim to help solve this problem: an online item, in this case a journal article, is assigned a unique identifier, and then that identifier is linked to a URL in a database. When you hit the identifier, it searches the database for the URL and then goes there. The DOI record file is simply updated when the URL changes. One goal of DOIs is to expedite persistence of online content. When we wrote the press release, we used the DOIs because the links would persist, and theoretically, anyone running across it years later would still be able to hit live links.

The most widely used DOI service is CrossRef, whose “mandate is to connect users to primary research content, by enabling publishers to work collectively. CrossRef is also the official DOI link registration agency for scholarly and professional publications.” Their Free DOI Lookup lets you type in information and return a DOI. You may also type a DOI in a box on their home page, and it will take you right to the relevant URL, often not the article itself but a summary page that lists all the options available for viewing, downloading, or purchasing content. (You may also add “http://dx.doi.org/” before the DOI to turn it into a URL.)

The DOI system is very flexible and can take any number of forms. A sample DOI from TWC No. 6 is “10.3983/twc.2011.0272.” Here’s what it means: first is our unique DOI number (10.3983), which was assigned to us when we signed up and paid our fees. Next are the journal abbreviation (twc), the year (2011), and a minimum-four-digit individual article number (0272), which is the same as the article’s OJS submission record. We made up the whole format to please ourselves, and to permit future growth—for example, we could replace “twc” with something else to reflect something else we wanted to index, like a monograph.

According to the DOI folks, the DOI system is “A system for persistent, semantically interoperable, identification of intellectual property entities on any digital network.” Various sorts of metadata may be uploaded into each item’s database entry—not just the URL, but also things like author names, whether the item is online or print, journal titles, journal abbreviated titles, whether the item is full text or abstract only, page number for first page, year of publication, in-house identifier, volume and issue, and individual references cited inside the article. The information chosen by the administrator to be collected is typed into an XML form, and that form is uploaded into a DOI system. TWC doesn’t deposit much: we file the first author, the URL, and the journal’s status as online (as opposed to print).

Although DOIs are most often identified with journals in the sciences with an online presence, TWC joined the club because we approve of the theory of the persistence of links. As part of the deal with DOI, we have to hotlink to DOIs in the articles’ works cited sections, so an issue or so back, we researched all the works cited sections of all the published articles and added in the DOIs so we would be compliant. Now we do this for each article as a production step; we have a CrossRef account that permits batch querying.

Regarding TWC’s failed deposit for No. 6: it turned out that the DOI folks had changed the way the deposit was formatted (in their terms, they updated to a new schema), only we didn’t know about it. We thought we were incorrectly formatting the XML file. We spent a lot of time examining it, trying to figure out where we went wrong. We got it done, but days late. Still, we’re committed to the broader issue of persistence of online content: in addition to depositing DOIs, TWC grants permission to libraries to make archive copies of each issue, and of course TWC’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License copyright lets anybody who wants to (nonprofit only!) duplicate the entire text and credit back to the original source—and we hope people will use the DOI, naturally, not the URL.

TWC is using an established tool built for scholars to help persistence of data. But it makes me wonder: what do fans do to ensure that an online fan artwork can be found? I can think of a few strategies: continuously curated links roundups, multiple copies of items at several blogs and archives, screenshots of artwork, zipped and filed files (vids? art? stories?) maintained in locked communities. (Comment with more!) It just reminds me of how much we rely on fans’ time-consuming, detailed organizational work to find things.

[META] Saint Dale, Shy Di, and ‘Elvis Is Still The King’

Before I get into my actual post, I want to point out that our mother organization, The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is engaged in one of its twice-yearly donation and fund drives right now. If you enjoy fannish things and want to support a group that advocates legally and culturally for fans (self-defined), you might consider donating.

Donation information is here.

The group asked Aja Romano to post about why she supports it, and her terrific post is here.

We do good stuff around here. I’m glad and proud to be part of it.

On to my thoughts this week:

Pop culture, the pundits tell us, produces “icons.” I haven’t tracked the etymology of this usage, but it’s definitely become a cliche. I think it’s obvious that it’s no accident that “icon” started out as a religious word. Fans can indeed venerate their celebrities to the point of worship, as the barely ironic title of “American Idol” reminds us every week.

Scholars have mused for decades on the ways that fan adulation resembles religion. Lewis’ 1992 volume “The Adoring Audience” (which has some must-read, seminal articles for anyone interested in fan studies) includes a fascinating chapter on Elvis Presley, and how some people treat him pretty much like an intercessory saint.

The Beatles, Patsy Cline, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, and even the NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt have received veneration and adoration in similar ways. Around here in Oklahoma, it’s absolutely ordinary to see large number 3′s, sprouting angel’s wings, in the rear windows of pickup trucks. “God needed a driver,” fans of Earnhardt wistfully reminisce, and they really aren’t exactly kidding. Sharyn McCrumb wrote a mystery a few years ago called “St. Dale,” about this exact phenomenon.

Some posts I read this winter online made me realize that the fictional character of Severus Snape from the Harry Potter books is on his way to being added to this list. Although everyone I’ve considered so far was (or is, in the case of two of the Beatles) a real person, the posts to which I refer reminded me forcibly of the chapter in Lewis’ book about Elvis.

I can’t offer links to the posts, or even cite them, and honestly wouldn’t feel right even if I could, because I ran across the phenomenon of women treating Snape like an intercessory saint, and even a daemon lover, on a community set up specifically to mock ridiculous behavior by fans. In this case, the mockers might not have realized what a well-known behavior this type of veneration really is.

Many scholars have concluded that people need saints, in some form, and as the culture continues through time, we will continue to create our saints, even from non-religious sources.

So sing along with Mojo Nixon, why don’t we — “Elvis is everywhere/Elvis is everything/Elvis is everybody/Elvis is still the King.”

You can look it up.

end.

[META] Transformative Works, Transformative History

The latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures has arrived, and it’s a special issue about “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein. There’s a lot of great material to sift through, so I’ll focus on the ideas that struck closest to home for me, particularly those articulated by Alexis Lothian in her symposium piece, “An archive of one’s own: Subcultural creativity and the politics of conservation.” But before I get to Lothian’s thought-provoking meditation on the politics of archiving fanworks, I will situate it within one of the major research questions posed by Reagin and Rubenstein in their introduction to the issue.

In this introduction, the authors explore the various points of connection between academic historical study and fan studies, noting that the two disciplines have not yet taken full advantage of the conversation made possible by their shared investments. Most importantly, they note that, rather than taking recognizably fannish subcultures and their associated practices seriously as exemplifying a particular mode of engagement with the phenomena of media history,

“historians have tended to analyze audiences and consumers as though they exemplified historical processes unrelated to media…it can be difficult to uncover what audience members or fans themselves thought, while many sources document the ideas, emotions, and intentions of the producers of commercial entertainments. “(4.2-4.4; emphasis mine)

In other words, historians have often used media artifacts and the traces left by their producers and fans as undifferentiated evidence of larger socio-historical phenomena, rather than zeroing in on what attentive fans may always have known, which I will summarize in quick shorthand as the intellectual pleasure of engaging with media artifacts on their own terms, and within dynamic interpretive communities, which in turn establish their own meta-level investments separate from the media artifact. Of course, this is by no means true of all historians — there are plenty of social historians who are deeply attentive to the history of interpretive communities and “schools of thought,” although in my personal experience, these are as likely to be found in an English or Sociology department as they are in a History department.

As to the second part of the quotation, about the tendency of historians and academics in general to privilege the producers’ interpretations of their own work over those interpretations, regardless of how loving or critical, put forth by fans, this reveals a more unfortunate power dynamic replicated by mainstream historical narratives of the relationship between media artifacts and social movements and worlds. And in order to address this power dynamic, the authors turn to the great thinker Walter Benjamin, who theorized a more intimate connection between media artifacts and the specific historical moments in which they are produced and are read (paying particular attention to the fact that these moments are not the same, that is, that media artifacts age according to a logic all their own, distinct from mainstream historical logic).

Lothian, in her symposium piece, takes on the French thinker Jacques Derrida, whose ideas were deeply influenced by Benjamin, especially when it comes to taking reading seriously, and thus, by extension, taking the archival act seriously. While Benjamin’s work speaks explicitly to questions people have about the first half of the Twentieth Century, especially regarding how film came to dominate visual culture, Derrida’s more recent work speaks even more closely to the New Media landscape fans now inhabit, making his work more relevant for pressing questions about the emerging shape of the contemporary archives of fanworks. While Benjamin’s politics remain difficult to translate onto the contemporary sphere, Derrida’s assessment of the power imbalances made visible by emerging archival practices speak closely to the concerns articulated by Lothian in her piece.

Lothian’s piece nicely delineates the ways in which fans are currently disempowered by media owners and U.S. law (ways likely familiar to anyone reading this post), and then goes on to speak to the specific and strategic value of the Archive of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works. Particularly in a historical moment in which the institutions that chronicle and archive our cultural moment, especially libraries, are under attack, it seems to me to be an awfully good idea to take control of our own desire to organize and collect those fanworks that we have produced and loved and learned from. But I also admire Lothian’s insistence on registering what may be lost in the process, according to the current logic of the archive.

This is the kind of rhetorical move of which Benjamin is fond — to take note of, and pay attention to, what seems to be fading, or shifting away from the center, precisely at the moment that it loses its power. Lothian’s discussion of Fandom Wank, and the way in which it represents what would be difficult to archive under the AO3′s current system, is really interesting in this regard — it reminds me of various homages to Geocities and Friendster, although perhaps it’s better compared to current conversations surrounding 4chan as the lingering anti-Facebook part of the internet, insisting on the ephemeral as a much-needed antidote to the implicit ban on anonymity from that site.

I want to emphasize the political undercurrent of Lothian’s argument at the end of the piece, where she states that “if we want to take seriously the possibility that ephemeral conflict and online sex might function to undermine dominant sexual, gendered, racialized, and economic ways of being, both on- and off-line, we cannot restrict fannish politics to the easily archivable.” Again, the difference Lothian carves out between strategic political action at the de facto “public face” of fandom and the messier, recognizably queer, politics of and within specific fan communities, is crucial to this argument. I know that I am invested in preserving the genuinely transformative energy of these more interpersonal kinds of politics, but I also think that there is a real need for nonprofit organizations like the OTW to balance the increasingly commercial rest of the internet.

Issue 6, people! Check it out!

[META] Bromance rediscovered

Hannah Hamad made a recent post on the Flow TV blog about the bromance between two members of the UK pop group Take That, and considered this event as an example of the recent trend of bromantic themes in movies and television.

I kind of hate the coined word “bromance,” a conflation of “brother” and “romance,” according to Wikipedia, but I guess we’re stuck with it.

Apparently film and TV critics and scholars are definitely seeing examples of this sort of male/male friendship, marked by emotional intimacy and openness and more physical touching, cropping up everywhere these days. Wikipedia, again, notes that it’s a post-feminist expansion of what is allowable in male friendships.

What is socially acceptable for Western men to do in friendships may indeed be changing, thanks to the impact of feminism, and it makes sense that these changes would show up in the culture, and in the buddy picture genre, from Butch and Sundance to “Boston Legal” and everywhere in between. And that pop stars would spin their friendships this way in their PR.

I’m kind of tickled when I read about bromance, though, because it’s as if the “conventional wisdom” about what happens in male friendships is now basically saying that it’s okay for men to nowadays do friendships the way women always have — hugging, touching, telling secrets, being intimate. More than just getting together for shared activities or sports, the traditional “common knowledge” about how men “do” friendship. So all the dither about “bromance” seems a little obvious to me, perhaps.

And I imagine there’s a huge disregard of history going on here — weren’t there periods in Western history where male friendship looked very different from the way John Wayne or Sam Spade are depicted as conducting it? Where more intimacy was considered ordinary and not a new sign of feminine influence, or perhaps relaxed expectations of gender roles thanks to the influence of gay culture?

And regardless of this newfangled trendy attention to bromance, literature featuring male friendship — and scholarly analysis of same — go back centuries.

The same buddy pictures and buddy TV shows that serve as examples of bromance, of course, are where slash fan fiction finds its characters and stories. In this genre of movie or show, the primary relationship is between the male protagonists, and any female romance is in the background, or relegated to some sort of Babe of the Week event.

Slash fan fiction pushes the friendship seen in these shows and movies further into intimacy, of course — to sexual intimacy and love, and that is sometimes offered as a criticism of m/m slash — that it focuses too much on sex and ignores or discounts other forms of friendship and affection that aren’t romantic or sexual.

Slash, of course, is a special case when it comes to reimagining or expanding what is possible in male/male friendship. For one thing, it’s written overwhelmingly by women. I’ve pondered many times the elegant saying I heard on Live Journal years ago: “Slash is about men the way “Watership Down” is about rabbits.” I tried very hard to track down the source of that aphorism, and both the writers to whom it’s usually attributed disavow saying it, though they both remember the online conversation (apparently now deleted or lost in the mists of time?) in which it was offered.

And while I am fascinated by the way slash fan fiction reimagines or reinterprets male/male relationships, I always readily admit two things: First, slash is, unavoidably, a very small and very specialized part of whatever societal conversation or evolution is going on about men and their gender roles, whether it’s bromance or the Victorian era or Abraham Lincoln’s friendships that is being discussed. And I’m noticing that often, in conversations both about bromance and about slash, the impact or effect or input of gay men isn’t considered much. There seem almost to be three separate conversations there. And they only rarely intersect.

Of course, depictions of gay men in Hollywood are occurring with glacial infrequency, and slash until recently was usually not trying at all to accurately depict actual gay men based on real life or real communities.

But I remain fascinated by all the ways society depicts the changing expectations and roles for men, in the media and in life, and it’s interesting to compare these different conversations.

[META] “The Last Ring-bearer”

Guest post by Helen W.

I follow how fan fiction is perceived by nonfannnish society through a weekly survey of references to fan fiction in mainstream media (somewhat broadly and arbitrarily defined). The past few weeks, I’ve been seeing a number of references to fan fiction in the context of the discussion of a recent English translation of Russian scientist Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ring-bearer (Последний кольценосец), a 140,000 word novel “set during and after the end of the War of the Ring (the climactic battle at the end of [J.R.R. Tolkien's] The Lord of the Rings) and told from the point of view of the losers“, according to Salon’s Laura Miller.

Though sold commercially in Russia, and in translation in several European languages, fear of the Tolkien estate has kept an English translation from being professionally published.

Several months ago, Yisroel Markov, who claims he spent “several lunch hours” on the project, produced a full translation of The Last Ring-bearer and, with the blessing of Yeskov, put a link to a download on his LiveJournal. And then the fun began.

I first became aware of The Last Ring-bearer via articles on Guardian.co.uk and Lovereading UK. Though the headlines of both articles imply the Tolkien estate is actively working against the dissemination of The Last Ring-bearer (“Free fan-fiction reworking of The Lord of the Rings infringes copyright”; and “Lord of the Rings reworking a hit with fans, but not Tolkien estate”), the estate’s response has actually been pretty muted. Quoting from the Guardian piece, David Brawn at HarperCollins, Tolkien’s exclusive publisher, said: “To my knowledge, none of us have ever been approached to publish this book.” Russia has operated outside copyright “for years”, Brawn added, though the situation is now changing. “Online there are lots of infringements which it is extremely difficult to do anything about,” he said. “When you get something as popular as Tolkien, fans want to create new stories. Most are pretty amateurish. Tolkien himself isn’t around so it’s the estate’s view that it’s best to say no to everything. If you let one in, you’d open the floodgates.”

( Compare this to recent press reports of the estate’s response to Steve Hilliard’s Mirkwood: A Novel about J.R.R. Tolkien. )

Mainstream attention to The Last Ring-bearer might have ended there if it hadn’t been for Salon’s Laura Miller, who published a lengthy piece on the novel on Feb. 15. Of particular interest to me was Miller’s closing: “Yeskov’s “parody” — for “The Last Ringbearer,” with its often sardonic twists on familiar Tolkien characters and events, comes a lot closer to being a parody than “Wind Done Gone” ever did — is just such a reminder. If it is fan fiction (and I’m not sure I’m in a position to pronounce on that), then it may be the most persuasive example yet of the artistic potential of the form.”

Miller’s piece caught the attention of, among others, The Atlantic’s Mark Bernstein, who wrote on his blog, “It’s a probe of the former Soviet Union and an examination of memory and of history, and if the rest of the book lives up to its opening chapters, much [of Miller's views on other subjects] may be forgiven.” A mention of Miller’s piece on Slashdot has garnered 581 comments. Showing an amazing lack of knowledge of fan fiction, a piece on Mumbai Mirror began, “Every story has two versions. However, for the longest time J R R Tolkien’s epic three-part novel Lord of the Rings was the only version of life on Middle Earth and the dark lord Sauron its main villain. However, a new book titled The Last Ringbearer looks at the War of the Ring (the climactic battle at the end of LOTR) from the perspective of the people of Mordor.”

And on The Moviefone Blog, Eric Larnick wrote, “How would you react if we told you a secret installment of ‘Lord of the Rings’ in some other-worldly language existed, circulating among a few intrepid literary archivists, building in rumor to the point of myth? Now what if we told you that that new ‘Lord of the Rings’ story has finally arrived Stateside — and that you can read it for free right now. Curious? […] [W]hen you’re done reading it, we can all begin speculating when the big-screen adaptation will finally happen (most likely the year 2350 when copyright law is abolished in the Great Disney Wars.)”

I’m still trying to figure out what this means, if anything, for fan fiction. Does a generally positive reaction to The Last Ring-bearer bleed over into respect for the thousands of fics published every day with no notice outside of fandom? I fear the opposite – that The Last Ring-bearer, alongside professionally-published works of highly derivative fiction (e.g. Wide Sargasso Sea, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) provides opportunities for the offhand insult of fan fiction in general. (Incidentally, Salon has also published a translation by Markov of an excellent essay by Yeskov, written for a fanzine in 2000, about why he wrote The Last Ring-bearer.)

I also can’t help but wonder how the coverage of The Last Ring-bearer would be different if Yeskov was a woman, or had written the novel anonymously so that Yeskov’s career in science wouldn’t be a legitimizing factor. Or whether there’d be any mainstream notice at all (tens of thousands of Lord of the Rings stories on the internet suggest not).