Talking With TV

For reasons related to teaching rather than research, I'm re-reading James Paul Gee's essay "The New Literacy Studies and the 'Social Turn'," which I have not read in many years, and in which I have just come across the following paragraph:

Sociohistorical psychology, following Vygotsky and later Bakhtin, has argued that the human mind is "furnished" through a process of "internalizing" or "appropriating" images, patterns, and words from the social activities in which one has participated. Further, thinking is not "private," but almost always mediated by "cultural tools," that is, artifacts, symbols, tools, technologies, and forms of language that have been historically and culturally shaped to carry out certain functions and carry certain meanings (cultural tools have certain "affordances," though people can transform them through using them in new settings).

It will, I suspect, surprise nobody to learn that I wrote "Vidding!" in the margin.

Last week, I received my contributor's copy of Metalepsis in Popular Culture, which includes a chapter I wrote on metalepsis in vids (and fan fiction, though I have to admit that the section on fic was not part of my original idea; it was suggested by the editors because they figured more people would be familiar with fic than with vids). I knew that the book would be quite expensive, especially in the US (it's an academic hardcover from a European press), so I made sure that the copyright transfer agreement allows me to distribute the essay online as long as I cite the original publication information (which is hardly a hardship, since the publication information is one of my very favorite things about the essay: I have a chapter in a book published by De Gruyter! this is really exciting!).

So here it is:

Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction. In Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 83-103.

In some ways, this essay is less accessible than my previous essay about vids; that one was relatively general, while this one is part of a very specific academic conversation about metalepsis and narrative theory. On the other hand, I think most fans will recognize the concept of metalepsis pretty quickly, even if the terminology is not immediately familiar. (For those who are curious about the terminology, I wrote a bit about metalepsis back when I first proposed the chapter.) And I think--I hope, anyway!--that the essay's account of laurashapiro and lithiumchic's "I Put You There" makes sense even without knowing all the ins and outs of the narrative theory elements.

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In other news, I am continuing to work on several other essays on vids, including one that I just came up with a couple of weeks ago while at the Computers & Writing conference. I was talking with a couple of the people who'd attended my presentation, explaining the various vid-related academic projects I'm working on, and it occurred to me that while I've made some complicated arguments about vids in relation to film studies, rhetoric, narrative theory, copyright law, and composition studies, I haven't really written anything that lays out the fundamentals of how I think vids work and why I think they should be interesting to the academic audiences with whom I'm usually communicating.

Duh.

I mean, I know why I haven't written that essay yet: I jumped into writing about vids because of two specific calls for papers that got me started thinking about vids in very particular ways. But I did have a moment of *facepalm* when I realized that I'd been going about things a bit backwards. I've got all these ideas and assumptions about how vids work which I talk about when I present on vids but which I haven't actually written down anywhere. I should write them down! And as I do, I need to be careful to convey how many of the ideas have been worked out and codified within the vidding community more generally; it's important to me that non-fannish academics understand the extent to which fans are self-theorizing.

So that very basic essay--not a history of vidding, but an explanation of how meaning gets created when making and watching vids and why this meaning-making is interesting from an academic point of view--is now on my to-do list for the summer.

I am finding that writing about vids is very much like vidding: just when I think I've gotten the queue under control, there are more ideas. And, just as with vidding, more ideas is a prospect simultaneously exciting and exhausting.

I've spent most of the last couple of months wrapping up some older research projects that predate my work on vids (although one of them, I think, has ended up being much stronger as a result of my work on vids!). But there are two important things going on this week that I had to make time to post about.

First: OTW membership and donation drive! I am ridiculously excited about some of the new donation premiums, especially the tote bag, but mostly I am excited about the chance to contribute to the amazing work that the OTW is doing -- or, rather, that the OTW is enabling fans to do for ourselves by providing an organizational structure that helps us pool our energy and expertise, teach each other new skills, provide stable homes for the fanworks we produce and share, and much more. And, of course, donating means membership, and membership means the chance to vote in the upcoming board elections.

A second matching donation challenge has just been posted, so it's the perfect time to donate!

Second: Open Access Week! My own commitment to open access began with fandom and has grown through my work on the staff of Transformative Works and Cultures, the OTW's online open-access academic journal. Karen Hellekson, one of TWC's co-editors, has written eloquently about the importance of open access and online publication; like her, I'm proud to be part of a journal and a movement that are changing the way academics share ideas.

In that spirit, I'm making available .pdfs of my first article on vids, published last spring:

"Your Own Imagination": Vidding And Vidwatching As Collaborative Interpretation. Film & Film Culture 5 (2010): 88-110. [AKA the one about "Vogue" and "Ring Them Bells." This is the article as it appears in print; unfortunately, some of the formatting came out a bit wonky and I confess I find the two-column format difficult to read because of the odd spacing, so I'm also posting a reformatted version that is less official but more readable.]

I've got another article in an anthology that should be coming out soon, which I'll share as soon as I've got the final version in hand!

In May 2009, I joined Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa to testify before the U.S. Copyright Office DMCA hearings; we argued for a DMCA exemption that would allow vidders and other creators of noncommercial remix video to rip DVDs for the purposes of making videos that constitute fair use of copyrighted material.

Today, we found out that the Copyright Office has released the ruling, and... WE WON!

Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos.

This ruling is amazing, and yet, having seen Rebecca Tushnet testify, I cannot say that it is totally surprising. She was on FIRE, people. I hope to be that awesome one day.

I am very pleased to have been part of such a terrific group effort. The EFF submitted the exemption proposal, the OTW submitted a reply comment in support of that proposal (shout-out to Casey Fiesler for the huge amounts of work she put in on that!), and then there was the testimony itself, the written responses to follow-up questions from the Copyright Office, and... a lot of waiting.

And now we all get to celebrate, because seriously, WOW.

I am happy to report that the University of Minnesota IRB Human Subjects Committee has approved my plans to interview vidders and vidwatchers! So, beginning this summer, I will be conducting interviews (in person when possible, but also by email or phone).

I'm interested in interviewing anybody who's willing to talk to me, including people who feel, or have felt in the past, that they don't (yet) know enough about vids to talk about them, who want to be able to leave substantive feedback about vids but sometimes have trouble doing so, etc. That is, I am not specifically looking for "expert opinions" on vids; I just want to talk to fans about their experiences making and/or watching vids, and especially about how they learned to make and/or watch vids.

My goal is to use these interviews to think about vidding and vidwatching as literacy practices. I'll be posting more about this idea in the next few weeks, but here's the short version:

( Of course, the short version is still four paragraphs long... )

Please note: I am not yet formally asking for interview volunteers; I will do that in a separate post. But I welcome any and all comments, and I am happy to answer any questions either about my interview plans or about this research more generally.

ETA: I've now posted a call for interview volunteers.

I'm in the Remixing (Techno)Feminist Pedagogies half-day workshop at C&W 2010 (where I'll be presenting on vids and vidding tomorrow, woo-hoo!), having just participated in a breakout session on using technology to foster collaboration in the classroom.

In the wake of this morning's session on Twitter, I'm thinking a lot about using Twitter in next semester's FYC class, and possibly other classes as well. (I've also got a post brewing about Twitter vs. Facebook and why I think that, despite having resisted Twitter for years, I'm going to prefer it to Facebook; more on that later.) The most immediate uses I can think of have to do with collaborative research processes, so part of what I'm thinking about is how to build up to that—how to scaffold the tech use. One idea: having students tweet discussion topics or questions before class rather than going over them in class; this way we all get to see them ahead of time. (I've used a version of this idea successfully in seminar in past years, so this would just be a new platform.) I like the way this strategy helps decentralize the classroom and rewards students who prefer to contribute textually rather than orally.

We also talked about hooking these micro-posts to longer-form writing, possibly through blog posts (I got to plug Dreamwidth!).

Really, though, we spent less time talking about tech than talking about what our starting points need to be. What do students already know? What don't they know? What do we assume they know that they might not? What platforms and tech are students actually using? What activities and discussions do we need to build into the syllabus to faciliate students' use of any of the various tech options? We talked about how we might need to start by helping students learn to read these sites: rhetorically, what are the differences among self-representation on (for example) Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace?

Pam Takayoshi brought us back to the question of relationships: how do we foster students' relationships with each other and with us as instructors? Wendy Anderson suggested a great first assignment—a questionnaire filled out and submitted online—that introduces students to Blackboard but also lets her start to get to know them in ways that foster not only individual teacher/student relationships but also a better classroom dynamic.

For me, the takeaway points were that 1) flexibility is key: students have to be able to fulfill assignments in multiple ways; we have to have a backup plan in case the system goes down, in case students' primary online access is via phones rather than computers, etc.; 2) we need to stay focused on the learning goal, not the technology—which sounds obvious, but in the excitement of Shiny Tech Toys, it can be easy to let the tech drive our pedagogy, and ultimately that doesn't end well.

For the past few months, I've been trying to finish up some academic projects that pre-date my current work on vids and vidding, which is why I haven't been posting much: I've been trying not to distract myself. But I've continued to think and talk about vids, both informally and at academic conferences, and I'm starting to get back to the writing part as well, so I hope to start posting more regularly again sometime soon.

I also have some ( good news to share... )

My budget request for that last grant also included a line for purchasing a paid DreamWidth account for the next three years. My paid time on LJ has lapsed, and I've decided that I have no particular need or desire to renew it; I'd rather support DreamWidth, and am very happy that I now have the means to do so. I'll be posting (and welcoming comments) under the same username at both locations, but DW will be my home base from now on.

Over the next few months, I want to start writing about vidding-related meta as well as vids themselves. With this in mind, I'm hoping to hear from as many people as possible:

What's your favorite vidding-related meta?

Link me to the public essays, discussions, vid commentaries, whatever, that you have found most personally interesting or useful or thought-provoking. I'm not looking for an exhaustive list; one or two links is fine (though feel free to include more if you can't narrow it down!). If you can't find or don't have time to look for the link, tell me what you can ("There was this great vidding chat about ____ in bop_radar's journal a few months ago..."). If it's a post or conversation from a mailing list (such as the vidder list on yahoogroups or a fandom-specific list) and thus can't be linked, again, tell me what you can and I'll try to track it down. Or, if it's easier, feel free to point me to your memories section or delicious links--although I really would love to know which of the posts on your list are your favorites, the ones most meaningful to you. And don't worry about whether it's something I've already read; old, new, well-known, obscure, on or off LJ/DW--it's all good. (I've read a fair amount of vidding meta, and I know what I find most interesting; now I want to know what other fans have found interesting.) It doesn't have to be by someone else; if there's something you wrote that you're particularly proud of, or that sparked really good conversation, point me to it!

Thanks in advance for any answers, links, and/or signal boosts!

I've just heard from the editor of Film & Film Culture: the article on vidding that I wrote for their special issue on Frontiers and Futures in Film and Digital Media has been accepted for publication, pending some relatively minor revisions. (This is the article about Luminosity's "Vogue" and sisabet's "Ring Them Bells.")

The reviewers' comments were generally quite positive, and their questions and suggestions are entirely reasonable. The final version is due September 15; I will hope to post a few excerpts from the article at that point if not earlier.

My first academic publication on vidding! I'm very pleased.

A couple of weeks ago I attended (and presented at) the IP/Gender Symposium at the American University Washington College of Law. It was a terrific experience. I was particularly happy about the opportunity to engage in ongoing conversation with a relatively limited number of people; most academic conferences have multiple panel streams, but IP/Gender had only one, so nearly everybody was able to attend all the presentations, which meant that as the day went on more and more presenters referenced earlier presentations. The organizers also allowed lots of time for discussion, which I really appreciated. And I got to hang out and chat with some delightful people, including a few I had met before (Francesca Coppa, Kristina Busse, and the ever-fabulous par_avion) and a great many more whom I was meeting for the first time (Rebecca Tushnet, Wendy Seltzer, Casey Fiesler [author of "Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content"], Karen Hellekson [TWC co-editor with Busse], and the other presenters).

For a detailed account of the presentations and ensuing discussions, I refer you to Professor Tushnet's blog; she posted her keynote address as well as notes from the first panel (which is the one I was on), the second panel, and the third panel.

All I can add is that the most eye-opening moment of the symposium for me personally was Ann Bartow's response to the first panel. She observed that everyone on that panel (including me) had framed fannish participation as a privilege that women ought to be allowed because we're not interfering with anybody's profits rather than as a right we can demand because everybody has a right to free speech. As Coppa put it later, we've been presenting ourselves as the Cinderellas who have picked all the lentils out of the ashes and are saying "Can I go to the fair use ball now?" when in fact we already have tickets to the ball because we're citizens. And Bartow's exactly right: defining fannish fair use as a form of free speech that we don't have to earn, that we can simply assert, had just... never occurred to me.

For anyone who's interested, I'm reproducing the text of my presentation under the cut. Like any text intended for performance, it changed a bit in delivery--I always end up ad-libbing or elaborating on points as I go; but the text that follows is what I had in front of me while I talked. It's based on the post on narrative from several months ago, so much of it will look familiar to anyone who's read that post, but it does include some new ideas--largely inspired by Coppa's "Swap Audio" presentation on Thursday night, in which she began to explore some of the ways in which we might theorize vidders' uses of music, not just video, as transformative--and I have given that section its own cut tag so that interested parties can skip right to it.

( Transformative Narrations: Fan-made Videos and Fair Use )

( how narrative theory might help us think about the audio elements of vids )