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[ADMIN] Quick note: all RSS/DW/LJ feeds of the Symposium Blog now point to its successor, Fanhackers

To everyone who used to be subscribed to TWC’s Symposium Blog via an RSS feed, Dreamwidth feed, or LiveJournal feed: this blog has been rebooted into a new blog called Fanhackers, and the name of the feed changed to reflect that. It used to syndicate everything posted at symposium.transformativeworks.org, and it now syndicates everything at fanhackers.transformativeworks.org.

Sorry for any confusion! The name change of the feed wasn’t announced properly because of a combination of feed-related tech troubles and forgetfulness on our part. Many apologies.

[QUOTE] From Henry Jenkins, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, p72

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies.

Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series. Almost everyone who watches the scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/44417837544/when-i-try-to-explain-slash-to-non-fans-i-often

[META] The Glass

lianesque said:

“have you seen this fantastic tumblr illustration of the famous Jenkins quote? raktajino-hot.tumblr.com/post/43063405852/link-to-quote-source-x”

That’s awesome! I wish we could do that with all quotes. Browsing around, it seems like there’s even a vid of this particular quote – henryjenkins.org/2008/05/the_glass.html. Looks like we could do a whole series of posts on “remixes of the famous Jenkins quote explaining slash with that scene between Spock and Kirk in ‘The Wrath of Khan’”. That’s probably the most successful fan studies quote ever.

I’ll post the full quote itself in a bit. Let’s see if we can get permission to post the vid and the image too.

(We poke the creators before posting anything fan-made. Reblogging may be one thing, but automatically crossposting things out of Tumblr and onto our WordPress site is another.)

[QUOTE] From Lawrence Lessig, Remix

We’ve already seen a similar frustration brew in the context of “fan fiction,” particularly around the Star Wars franchise. As with the Harry Potter story, Lucasfilm learned early on that there were millions who wanted to build upon Star Wars, and few who thought themselves restricted by the rules of copyright. Like Warner, Lucasfilm recognized that these fans could provide real value to the franchise. So under the banner of encouraging this fan culture, Lucasfilm offered free Web space to anyone wanting to set up a fan home page.

But the fine print in this offer struck many as unfair. The contract read:

“The creation of derivative works based on or derived from the Star Wars Properties, including, but not limited to, products, services, fonts, icons, link buttons, wallpaper, desktop themes, online postcards and greeting cards and unlicensed merchandise (whether sold, bartered or given away) is expressly prohibited. If despite these Terms of Service you do create any derivative works based on or derived from the Star Wars Properties, such derivative works shall be deemed and shall remain the property of Lucasfilm Ltd. in perpetuity.”

Translation: “Work hard here, Star Wars fans, to make our franchise flourish, but don’t expect that anything you make is actually yours. You, Star Wars fans, are our sharecroppers.”

(…)

But though the objective of profit is not a problem, the manner in which that profit is secured can be. The respect, or lack of respect, demonstrated by the terms under which the remix gets made says something to the remixer about how his work is valued. So again, when Lucas claims all right to profit from a remix, or when he claims a perpetual right to profit from stuff mixed with a remix, he expresses a view about his creativity versus theirs: about which is more important, about which deserves respect.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/44348237435/weve-already-seen-a-similar-frustration-brew-in

[ADMIN] Introducing Fanhackers, a directory of informative things about fans

The Journal committee is proud to announce that Fanhackers, the shinier and more experimental new incarnation of the Symposium blog, is now open for business!

Short version

Fanhackers is a place for fans, academics, activists, and anyone else with an interest in info on fans to share and discover new ideas. It’s is a group blog where you can do the following things:

  • Post, search and discuss good fannish or academic meta about fans. Tl;dr allowed. This is the old Symposium blog, but much easier to post to.
  • Post and answer requests for copies of inaccessible academic papers that you need.
  • Post and explore quotes from long, hard to find, or otherwise hard-to-read works on fans. Just the really good bits, no tl;dr allowed.
  • Post and follow links to resources on fans, tools for writing and research, and news that may be of interest to people who like info and analysis on fans.

Read more about Fanhackers and the other functionality we’re planning on the About page. You can keep track via the WordPress mirror, the Tumblr mirror, Twitter, the DW and LJ feeds, or the RSS and e-mail subscription options detailed here.

Longer version

Making sure reliable info on fans gets made and reaches the right people has always been a priority for the OTW. The OTW blog reports regularly on important news that fans may want to know about. Fanlore is a place for fans to preserve their own history in their own words. The legal advocacy team works tirelessly to get correct info on fans to activists and governmental organizations whose actions can have an impact on fans. The fan video and multimedia project has prepared a range of practical and educational resources for and about vidders, and so on.

The Journal committee has been especially concerned with creating good info and getting it out there. Among other things, we made a whole new open access academic journal about fans, we helped get the vidding bibliography off the ground and are working to expand it into a broader resource on all things fan studies, and we made the Symposium blog as a place for fans and academics to share meta in a less formal setting.

We can and need to do better than that, though. There’s never been this much insightful and relevant academic, fannish and other meta on fans being created. However, a lot of the useful ideas from inside that meta never get beyond the borders of wherever they were published and don’t reach the people who want or need to hear them. Academic meta on fans remains hard to access because it’s often locked in expensive books and journals, or written in often needlessly complicated and inaccessible language. Fannish meta is scattered all around the internet. Activists working on topics like copyright and open culture often publish ideas that are incredibly relevant to fans, but many of those ideas never reach fannish spaces. We have so much info, and yet so much of it goes to waste.

Fanhackers wants to experiment with new ways of making sure that info on fans reaches the people who need it – not just when they know the info exists and are actively looking for it, but also when they have no idea yet that there’s something about fans that they need to know.

We want to make sure that everyone who’s looking for good info or analysis on fans can find what they need as quickly and as cheaply as possible, whether they need fannish or academic meta, a particular piece of information, or help. We want to make sure that fans and academics can cooperate and share their info, meta, publishing tools, and research tools, so that the wealth of work and experience that we already have is put to better use. We want to make sure that academic meta on fans is published in usable and useful ways, openly and in formats that make it easy to share and improve the info, so that fans can access what’s being said about them and academics can see their hard work put to use by many people. We want to make sure that anyone can discover what info on fans is already out there, so that all that work can get built upon rather than duplicated. And we want a place to talk about all the important, amusing, and informative things about fans that we stumble across.

Fanhackers is a space for us to experiment with how we can make those things happen. We’ll be changing and adding functionality as we figure out what works. Please drop by, browse around, share the info you have, and tell us how we can make this more useful and enjoyable.

[REQUEST] Question: J.J. Abrams on Women & Star Trek

This may be a bit too out there, but I’ve been trying to find a throw-away statement by J.J. Abrams regarding the relationship of Star Trek and female fans. I saw it on my flist, but can’t find it again, nor by googling. It was something to the effect of “we put a birth into the reboot in order to appeal to women”? Context is that I’ve been reading on early Star Trek zine history and the split between “media” and “SFF fandom”, and it would be deliciously ironic (and, lbr, tears-inducing) to contrast Abram’s utter cluelessness/erasure with the actual history of Trek fandom. If that quote exists and I didn’t just hallucinate it all!

[QUOTE] From Hye-Kyung Lee, Cultural consumer and copyright: a case study of anime fansubbing

Similarly, fansubbing has been regarded as an equivalent for TV. In the anime industry context, the role of TV is crucial in nurturing consumer demand for DVDs. For example, the Japanese anime industry witnesses fans normally testing the anime via TV viewing and then deciding on their purchase of DVDs and Blu-ray DVDs (my interview with two commentators from the Japanese anime industry). Hence, Japanese anime producers have traditionally treated TV broadcasting as a form of advertising. While lamenting the lack of TV coverage of anime in the United States, English fansubbers see their activity as serving as free promotion. Interestingly, this aspect of fansubbing was widely acknowledged by the US anime industry. Until recently, the industry was generally nonchalant towards fansubbing but tended to agree on its viral marketing and market tester aspects.

(…)

Witnessing the expansion of digital fansubbing and the ubiquity of fansubbed anime on the Internet, the industry has broken its silence and begun challenging fansubbing’s legitimacy. It now defines fansubbing as piracy, and asks fans to stop making and using fansubs (Smith 2007).

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/44211750695/similarly-fansubbing-has-been-regarded-as-an

[QUOTE] From Fan-Yi Lam, Comic Market: How the World’s Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped Japanese Dōjinshi Culture, p242

(besides Type-Moon) Two other dōjin games, Higurashi no naku koro ni (2002–6, When they cry) by the circle 07th Expansion and Tōhō Project (1996–present, Orient project) by the Shanghai Alice Gengakudan circle, later became commercial hits of a similar or even surpassing scale. However, this phenomenon is not some kind of “amateur revolution.” Type-Moon’s Nasu Kinoko and Takeuchi Takashi and 07th Expansion’s Ryūkishi07 had already made steps into the professional industry before becoming famous in the dōjinshi scene. Much like Shinkai Makoto—the fan-creator of the OVA Voices of a Distant Star (2002, Hoshi no koe)—these creators already had made a career in the professional industry and were adored by fans for their passion and talents, rather than for their amateur status.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/43798473318/besides-type-moon-two-other-d-jin-games

[QUOTE] From Fan-Yi Lam, Comic Market: How the World’s Biggest Amateur Comic Fair Shaped Japanese Dōjinshi Culture

When the Comic Market was first held, it was one among many well-known dōjinshi conventions such as Manga Communication or Nihon Manga Taikai (Japan Manga Convention), at which all kinds of groups producing manga-and anime-related fanworks could physically gather together in order to share, buy, and sell dōjinshi. Dōjinshi circles, anime fan societies and science fiction school clubs sat side-by-side exchanging dōjinshi and fanzines.

But no fan scene is immune to controversies and imbroglios, and the Japanese dōjinshi scene was no exception. In 1975, a woman who had made critical remarks about the Manga Taikai was excluded from that convention, and subsequently a firestorm of anger among fans produced a movement against the Manga Taikai led by the famous circle Meikyū (Labyrinth), which resulted in the conception of a new alternative convention. On December 21, 1975, the first Comic Market—”a fan event from fans for fans”—was held in Tokyo.

Comike’s underlying vision was of an open and unrestricted dōjinshi fair, offering a marketplace without limitations on content or access. At the time, manga and anime fandom was organized around formal circles (particularly the school clubs that charged membership fees and produced regular group publications), and conventions were gathering places for the groups—rather than that of individual fans. Crucially, and from the beginning, Comike attracted visitors who were not just circle or club members, and who did not necessarily themselves produce fanworks. This innovation created its now massive popularity in Japan and increasingly, with international fans as well. Comike was soon held three times a year, attracting ever-increasing numbers of groups and fans.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/43797401104/when-the-comic-market-was-first-held-it-was-one

[QUOTE] From Rebecca Tushnet, Economies of Desire: Fair Use and Marketplace Assumptions

Fanworks, as creative endeavors existing outside the money economy, are fundamentally based on the inexhaustibility of the imagination. Yet the creative desires fanworks express and satisfy are not alien to other, marketized creative works. Indeed, creators’ passions are strikingly similar across the boundary between “original”/authorized and unauthorized derivative works. That similarity has lessons for copyright’s incentivizing ambitions, as well as for a broader cultural policy that strives to allow people to express themselves creatively.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/43791126247/fanworks-as-creative-endeavors-existing-outside

[QUOTE] From In the Future, All Space Marines Will Be Warhammer 40K Space Marines M.C.A. Hogarth on GW claiming common law trademark on the term ‘space marines’ (via transformativeworks)

In their last email to me, Games Workshop stated that they believe that their recent entrée into the e-book market gives them the common law trademark for the term “space marine” in all formats. If they choose to proceed on that belief, science fiction will lose a term that’s been a part of its canon since its inception. Space marines were around long before Games Workshop. But if GW has their way, in the future, no one will be able to use the term “space marine” without it referring to the space marines of the Warhammer 40K universe.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/42497647234/in-their-last-email-to-me-games-workshop-stated

[QUOTE] From Rebecca Tushnet, Economies of Desire: Fair Use and Marketplace Assumptions

(…) fan experiences of creativity are also incompatible with control-based theories of copyright positing that authors’ personalities are harmed by unauthorized uses. Julie Cohen has pointed out that the incentive model, in which copyright is a vital driver of creativity, “justifies drawing firm distinctions between authors, on the one hand, and consumers, imitators, and improvers on the other.” Once that move has succeeded, broad rights to control copying, public distribution, and derivative works follow as night follows day.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/41516247497/fan-experiences-of-creativity-are-also

[QUOTE] From Rebecca Tushnet, Economies of Desire: Fair Use and Marketplace Assumptions

And because fanworks in their inception are based on the original, the ability to have more and more without erasing the original structures the entire enterprise. One popular fan story form is known as “Five Things That Never Happened.” A “Five Things” story is fanwork that sets forth five alternate realities, each usually incompatible with one another.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/41516132207/and-because-fanworks-in-their-inception-are-based

[LINK] Legal analysis bibliography on Fanlore

fanlore.org/wiki/Legal_Analysis

There have been a number of articles in law reviews and legal publications addressing various fanwork-related issues, beginning with fan fiction and gradually expanding to other fanworks. This is a bibliography, with links to the full articles where available, in chronological order by year, alphabetical by author within the year. The citation format is close to Bluebook. (From the page)

[QUOTE] From Kristina Busse: Attention Economy, Layered Publics, and Research Ethics

In other words, if we only cite from those blogs that understand themselves to be clearly in public space, we may ignore both the possibly less guarded (and thus more unmediated?) voices as well as those who do not have the comfort or privilege to push themselves into the public light of the attention economy. Balancing our research to respect those voices without exposing them unnecessarily is one of the central challenges of online researchers.

Crosspost: fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/41362768225/in-other-words-if-we-only-cite-from-those-blogs