Category Archives: academic

a safe haven for fan culture

The Organization for Transformative Works is a new “nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms.”
Interestingly, the OTW defines itself -? and by implication, fan culture in general -? as a “predominately female community.” The board of directors is made up of a distinguished and, diverging from fan culture norms, non-anonymous group of women academics spanning film studies, english, interaction design and law, and chaired by the bestselling fantasy author Naomi Novik (J.K. Rowling is not a member). In comments on his website, Ethan Zuckerman points out that

…it’s important to understand the definition of “fan culture” – media fandom, fanfic and vidding, a culture that’s predominantly female, though not exclusively so. I see this statement in OTW’s values as a reflection on the fact that politically-focused remixing of videos has received a great deal of attention from legal and media activists (Lessig, for instance) in recent years. Some women who’ve been involved with remixing television and movie clips for decades, producing sophisticated works often with incredibly primitive tools, are understandably pissed off that a new generation of political activists are being credited with “inventing the remix”.

In a nod to Virginia Woolf, next summer the OTW will launch “An Archive of One’s Own,” a space dedicated to the preservation and legal protection of fan-made works:

An Archive Of Our Own’s first goal is to create a new open-source software package to allow fans to host their own robust, full-featured archives, which can support even an archive on a very large scale of hundreds of thousands of stories and has the social networking features to make it easier for fans to connect to one another through their work.
Our second goal is to use this software to provide a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanfiction and other transformative fanworks, where these can be sheltered by the advocacy of the OTW and take advantage of the OTW’s work in articulating the case for the legality and social value of these works.

OTW will also publish an academic journal and a public wiki devoted to fandom and fan culture history. All looks very promising.

ghost story

02138, a magazine aimed at Harvard alumni, has a great article about the widespread practice among professors of using low-wage student labor to research and even write their books.

…in any number of academic offices at Harvard, the relationship between “author” and researcher(s) is a distinctly gray area. A young economics professor hires seven researchers, none yet in graduate school, several of them pulling 70-hour work-weeks; historians farm out their research to teams of graduate students, who prepare meticulously written memos that are closely assimilated into the finished work; law school professors “write” books that acknowledge dozens of research assistants without specifying their contributions. These days, it is practically the norm for tenured professors to have research and writing squads working on their publications, quietly employed at stages of co-authorship ranging from the non-controversial (photocopying) to more authorial labor, such as significant research on topics central to the final work, to what can only be called ghostwriting.

Ideally, this would constitute a sort of apprentice system -? one generation of scholars teaching the next through joint endeavor. But in reality the collaborative element, though quietly sanctioned by universities (the article goes into this a bit), receives no direct blessing or stated pedagogical justification. A ghost ensemble works quietly behind the scenes to keep up the appearance of heroic, individual authorship.

commentpress and the communications circuit

So much to say about this but for the moment I only have time for a quick link. Our close friend and colleague Kathleen Fitzpatrick just published a must-read paper on MediaCommons, in conjunction with the Journal of Electronic Publishing. The paper is about CommentPress, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s a deep look at how Internet-based technologies hold the potential for a large-scale shift in scholarly communication toward a more communal model, taking CommentPress as just a small intimation of things possibly to come. What’s particularly gratifying for this reader is how Kathleen puts CommentPress in the larger context from which it was developed-?in particular, the rise of blogs and the move in some wired circles of the academy back to something resembling the coffeehouse model of scholarly conversation.
Two years ago we held an informal meeting of leading academic bloggers to discuss how this new Web-based conversation perhaps contained the seeds of broader change in scholarly publishing. Out of the ideas that were thrown about in that meeting grew our series of blog hacks that we loosely termed “networked books,” which, in turn, eventually evolved into CommentPress (not to mention MediaCommons). Kathleen’s paper brilliantly draws it all together.
Of course, CommentPress represents only the tiniest step forward. But perhaps out of Kathleen’s elegant, lucid argument we can draw the idea for the next experiment. To that end, I urge everyone to spend time on the CommentPress version (always nice when form engages so directly with content) and to continue the conversation there.
p.s. -? also feel free to look at an earlier version of this paper, which Kathleen workshopped in CommentPress.

the place of blogs in the academy

danah boyd has written a response to all the conversation generated by her 24 june blog post in which she tried to interpret usage patterns of facebook and myspace in terms of class. i’m not particuarly interested in the original post or her substantive responses but she makes some interesting comments about the difference between traditional academic writing and blogging.
as i see it, danah sadly bends over backward to distinguish the blog post from serious academic writing. she says, “In academic writing, I write for posterity. In my blog, I write to get an issue off my chest and to work things out while they are still raw.” what i find significant though is that this blog post has, according to danah, generated thousands of quotes and references. either the blogosphere is just filled with meaningless back and forth banter or the blog post launched what could be or could have been (if handled better) a significant public debate. for argument sake, let’s assume the latter, in which case, it seems a shame that there is such a strong tendency to devalue a new form of writing which is proving to be such a powerful engine of serious discussion.
yes, blogs are not the same as formal academic papers, but i’m not sure that is the same as saying that they can’t be as valuable within the universe of scholarly discourse.
can we imagine a universe where blogging is not automatically put into a “not-really-up-to-par-for-the-academy” category.

call for papers: the internet, publishing, and the future of literature

John Holbo just along this exciting CFP for a seminar he’s convening on “e-publishing/intertubes stuff” at the ALSC conference this October in Chicago. An excerpt:

What role will the Internet play in publishing, scholarly research, cultural journalism, and literary commentary in general? Do bloggers have a role to play in cultural and literary discussion comparable to their developing importance in political reporting and argument? How will e-publishing affect scholarship, university presses, promotion and tenure? What will become of the book?

Read more at The Valve.

ithaka university publishing report in commentpress

The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library has just released an interactive, CommentPress-powered edition of “University Publishing In A Digital Age,” the Ithaka report that in recent weeks has sent ripples through the scholarly publishing community. Please spread the word and take part in the discussion that hopefully will unfold there:
http://scholarlypublishing.org/ithakareport/
Incidentally, this site uses the just-released version 1.3 of CommentPress, which I’ll talk more about tomorrow. Here’s the intro from the good folks at Michigan (thanks especially to Maria Bonn and Shana Kimball for taking the initiative on this):

On July 26, 2007, Ithaka released “University Publishing In A Digital Age.” The report has been met with great interest by the academic community and has already engendered a great deal of lively discussion.
Coincidentally, that same week, the Institute For the Future of the Book released CommentPress, an online textual annotation tool with great promise for promoting scholarly discussion and collaboration.
At the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library we have watched both of these developments with keen interest. Our work as online scholarly publishers, our role as publisher of the Journal of Electronic Publishing and our close affiliation with the University of Michigan Press through our joint initiative, digitalculturebooks, directs us to paying close attention to both the conditions and tools of scholarly publishing.
The happy simultaneity of the release of the Ithaka Report and CommentPress prompted us to view the report as ideal material with which to experiment with CommentPress. With the gracious cooperation of the authors of the report, we have created a version of “University Publishing In A Digital Age” which invites public commentary and which we hope will serve as a basis for further discussions in our community.
In the words of the authors, “this paper argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs.” We welcome you to engage in that argument in this space.

SciVee: web video for the sciences

Via Slashdot, I just came across what could be a major innovation in science publishing. The National Science Foundation, the Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have joined forces to launch, SciVee, an experimental media sharing platform that allows scientists to synch short video lectures with paper outlines:

SciVee, created for scientists, by scientists, moves science beyond the printed word and lecture theater taking advantage of the internet as a communication medium where scientists young and old have a place and a voice.

The site is in alpha and has only a handful of community submissions, but it’s enough to give a sense of how profoundly useful this could become. Video entries can be navigated internally by topic segments, and are accompanied by a link to the full paper, jpegs of figures, tags, a reader rating system and a comment area.
scivee.jpg
Peer networking functions are supposedly also in the works, although this seems geared solely as a dissimenation and access tool for already vetted papers, not a peer-to-peer review forum. It would be great within this model to open submissions to material other than papers such as documentaries, simulations, teaching modules etc. It has the potential to grow into a resource not just for research but for pedagogy and open access curriculum building.
It’s very encouraging to see web video technologies evolving beyond the generalized, distractoid culture of YouTube and being adapted to the needs of particular communities. Scholars in the humanities, film and media studies especially, should take note. Imagine a more advanced version of the In Media Res feature we have running over at MediaCommons, where in addition to basic blog-like commenting you could have audio narration of clips, video annotation with time code precision, football commentator-style drawing over the action, editing tools and easy mashup capabilities – ?all of it built on robust archival infrastructure of the kind that underlies SciVee.

macarthur and HASTAC open $2 million digital media and learning competition

From Cathy Davidson at HASTAC:
As part of its $50 million initiative on Digital Media and Learning initiative launched last year (www.digitallearning.macfound.org), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just announced support for a $2 million open Digital Media and Learning Competition, with entries due on October 15, 2007. All details about the competition and application requirements can be found at www.dmlcompetition.net. Awards will be made in two categories, Innovation Awards and Knowledge-Networking Awards. Innovation Awards ($100,000 and $250,000) will support learning pioneers, entrepreneurs, and builders of new digital learning environments for formal and informal learning. Knowledge-Networking Awards ($30,000-75,000) will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. Primary applicants must be U.S. citizens or residents, however other members of a research team need not meet this requirement.
The competition is administered by HASTAC (“haystack”—Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), an innovative “Web 2.0” virtual institution of more than eighty institutes, centers, and community organizations anchored at the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. Anyone can join the HASTAC network by registering on the website (www.hastac.org) and contributing content and ideas, including podcasts, blogs, or collaborative opportunities.

ithaka report on scholarly publishing

From a first skim and browsing of initial responses, the new report from the non-profit scholarly technologies research group Ithaka, “University Publishing in a Digital Age,” seems like a breath of fresh air. The Institute was one of the many stops along the way for the Ithaka team, which included the brilliant Laura Brown, former director of Oxford University Press in the States, and we’re glad to see Gamer Theory is referenced as an important experiment with the monograph form.
A good summary of the report and a roundup of notable reactions (all positive) in the academic community is up on Inside Higher Ed. Recommendations center around better coordination among presses on combining services, tools and infrastructure for digital scholarship. They also advocate closer integration of presses with the infrastructure and scholarly life of their host universities, especially the library systems, who have much to offer in the area of digital communications. This is something we’ve argued for a long time and it’s encouraging to see this put forth in what will no doubt be an influential document in the field.
One area that, from my initial reading, is not siginificatnly dealt with is the evolution of scholarly authority (peer review, institutional warrants etc.) and the emergence of alternative models for its production. Kathleen Fitzpatrick ponders this on the MediaCommons blog:

The report calls universities to task for their failures to recognize the ways that digital modes of communication are reshaping the ways that scholarly communication takes place, resulting in, as they say, “a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.”
Perhaps I’ll find this when I read the full report, but it seems to me that the inverse is perversely true as well, that the stated “important values of the academy” -? those that have us clinging to established models of authority as embodied in traditional publishing structures -? are increasingly out of step with the ways scholarly communication actually takes place today, and the new modes of authority that the digital makes possible. This is the gap that MediaCommons hopes to bridge, not just updating the scholarly publishing industry, but updating the ways that academic assessments of authority are conducted.