What's your favorite vidding-related meta?

2009-10-21T16:46:32Z

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!

Research presentation @ UMM's faculty seminar series

2009-10-02T17:33:08Z

First, a quick bit of bureacracy: I'm now cross-posting to DreamWidth (same username), so if you're reading primarily on DreamWidth these days, feel free to add me to your DW circle and I'll happily reciprocate.

And now, the main business of this post.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to give a presentation about my current research to the UMM campus community as part of our Thursday Afternoon Faculty Seminar (TAFS) series, and it reminded me how lucky I am to be at a school with such terrific students and such supportive colleagues. Quite a number of students showed up; it was wonderful to look out at the audience and see Caitlin, Josh, Katrina, Meaghan, Sophie, and Taryn, and a few students I didn't even know! And so many of my colleagues came as well, not just from English and Communication, Media, & Rhetoric, but from Anthropology, Art History, Biology, Computer Science, French, from media services, from the library.

And I got to talk to all of these people about vids!

( more about the presentation under the cut )

( outline of the presentation )

Possibly my favorite part was after the presentation was over. A colleague and partner who are fans themselves (which I hadn't known!) came up to tell me that they appreciated hearing fans presented more positively than we often are (I should hope so! This is my own life I'm talking about here!), and to ask whether I'd seen "Women's Work" (why yes, yes I have). Another colleague came up to tell me about her experience making slide shows ("with strobe lights!") in the women's center at her college in the '70s. A student and I chatted about her interest in anime and manga (and I had to admit that my knowledge is almost all second-hand, although I did put my minimal familiarity with AMVs at her disposal). And this morning I got an email from a colleague in Computer Science telling me about Kolmogorov complexity and mulling over the ways in which it's related to what I'm writing about. Interdisciplinarity FTW!

The presentation was recorded and will at some point be available as a podcast; I'll provide a link once it's up. I admit I'm a little nervous about linking to it; as I said to someone after the presentation, nobody close-reads like fans do, and I'm fairly sure that anyone scrutinizing the presentation will find hundreds of things I could have explained more clearly, vids I should have mentioned and didn't, and so on. I just have to keep reminding myself that this presentation, like so much of my academic work, wasn't really for fans (though I was grateful to have fans there in the audience!). As fans, we do an excellent job of explaining ourselves to ourselves in ways that make sense to us; we don't need academics to explain us. But academics frequently don't know much about fandom at all, let alone the complexity and intelligence of fannish endeavor, or the ways in which understanding fannish endeavor might help us better understand things outside fandom, and that's the kind of work that I'm attempting to do in my current projects.

And speaking of current projects, I should be posting excerpts from or possibly .pdfs of forthcoming articles sometime next week. I'll be posting under lock, but am happy to give access to anyone who's interested.

Talking Back to TV

What's your favorite vidding-related meta?

Research presentation @ UMM's faculty seminar series