Status report

[tishaturk]

I've been working on this new vid-related research agenda for just about six months now, so I think it's time to pause and take stock of what I've gotten done in that time.

grant proposals

• Faculty Research Enhancement Fund new research grant ($1,500, received). I mentioned this one when I first started writing in this LJ; it was the first piece of this new project that I worked on, and it's made much of the later work possible.


• Grant-in-Aid ($20,000, under review). This is the big one; if it's accepted, I'd have money to hire two undergraduate assistants: one to digitize older vids currently available only on VHS (using UMM's media services equipment--the guys in media services have been tremendously supportive and helpful so far) and a second to sift through vid-related posts on LiveJournal and tag relevant posts for me to come back to later. (Yes, I'd be paying someone to read LiveJournal. No, those of you who are not UMM students may not apply.) I'd also have travel funds to conduct interviews at VividCon and possibly to visit one or two early vidders who don't attend VividCon, and some funds for equipment (like hard drives to store digitized vids).


• Imagine Fund ($3,000, under review). This grant would be primarily for purchasing additional books. A small chunk of it would also go to acquiring the complete remastered Star Trek DVDs, because I've never seen Star Trek (I know, I know, I'm a bad media fan, I'm sorry, let's move on). Technically the DVDs and books would be university property, and while I can't imagine that anyone else would want the books (especially after I've scribbled in them), I rather like the idea of giving the DVDs to the campus library.


• Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing proposal ($2,000, under review). I'm hoping to develop a writing class based in part on the vid-related research I've been doing; the class wouldn't focus on vids specifically but on participatory culture more generally: web 2.0, blogging, YouTube, BitTorrent, gaming, wikis, fanfiction, mashups, etc. I know there are some classes out there along these lines, and I need to find out where and what they are, figure out what's worked and what hasn't. The courses I've come across aren't specifically writing classes, so I'll need to do a lot of my own thinking and planning, but I don't see any need to completely reinvent the wheel.

conference proposals

• Narrative conference (rejected). I'm still grumpy about this one; I love the Narrative conference, and I think the proposal was pretty good (well, obviously, or I wouldn't have sent it in). Ah well.


• IP/Gender symposium (accepted). I'm going to DC in April to talk about narrative theory to a bunch of lawyers. Words fail to adequately express my amusement. I'm really looking forward to the conference, actually--narrative theory does help show why vids are transformative. But telling my colleagues about it? Comedy gold, people.


• Feminisms & Rhetorics conference (under review). This is another one I'm really hoping works out; I've never been to the F&R conference, but I've heard great things about it from friends who have gone. Plus, telling a bunch of feminist rhetoricians about vids! Could there be anything more awesome?

paper proposals

• Film and Film Culture special issue (proposal accepted; paper under review). The fact that the proposal was accepted is no guarantee that the paper will be; it's undergoing peer review right now. I'm hopeful about it, of course, but I was very conscious the whole time I was writing that my personal crash course in film studies was necessarily minimal, and it's entirely possible that, even if the reviewers think vids themselves are interesting, they'll think I haven't written about them well or have misjudged the journal's audience or not been clear enough about the argument's theoretical underpinnings or any of a number of other things. But whatever else happens, I've completed a 5,000-word essay on vids, and if Film and Film Culture doesn't want it I can tweak it and shop it around, so that's something. Plus one of my colleagues and I came up with the phrase "participatory interpretation" to describe the processes of vidding and vidwatching, which I think is pretty cool. I may actually post about that piece of the paper at some point; I had hoped to post chunks of drafts as the paper was in progress, but obviously that didn't happen, largely because the paper ended up being written very fast and mostly very late at night during an extremely stressful week. I keep having to open the file to check that the paper is really there and I didn't just hallucinate the entire experience.


• Metalepsis in Popular Culture chapter (proposal accepted; chapter due in August). One of the co-editors e-mailed me the good news on a day when I very much needed it. I'm very, very excited about this project, not least because the editors are gathering all the contributors together for a symposium this June... in Switzerland. The prospect of the symposium is pretty exciting, partly because, hey, Switzerland! but mostly because I am going to get to be in a room with a bunch of other people who are geeky about the exact same things that I am geeky about. Any fan who has been to an awesome con knows just what a good feeling that can be.

other

• Single semester leave application (rejected). I'm trying not to be too annoyed about this, but I do wish I'd gotten better feedback on the proposal I submitted (the comments were cryptic at best, and seemed to boil down to "some of us quite like this idea and others of us think you've gone utterly mad," which is fair but not actually useful). But if some of the grants come through and I can hire research assistants to enable me to spend less time on technical tasks and info-gathering and more time on thinking and writing, not getting leave won't be too bad a setback. Still, it would have been nice to have a semester in which my only job was to think and write about vids.

All of which is to say: I've been busy, and wow, I am tired. But some good things are already happening, and I hope for more to come. Thanks to everybody who's already helped nudge my thinking through e-mail conversations and comments on posts; it's much appreciated.