Date: 2021-06-07 09:39 Subject: [Sticky 2] Fanstuff now locked Security: Public

I've decided to f-lock all posts related to my own fic and art (for this reason, which is also locked for added transparency!). If you'd like to get updates on my fanstuff via here, please comment to be added.

Date: 2020-01-01 23:53 Subject: [Sticky 1] Public service announcement Security: Public

I still crosspost here and use IJ for commenting, but my Dreamwidth account is now my home base and contains all the research-related shiny and info. Please visit!

Date: 2011-12-23 13:42 Subject: Importing LJ communities into Dreamwidth Security: Public Mood: contemplative Tags: dreamwidth livejournal

So Dreamwidth is working on a way to import whole LJ communities instead of just personal journals. A few early details are over here.

Personally, cool feature. What interests me most is how comm owners are going to deal with moving comms while keeping everyone informed and consenting to things. Thoughts?

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/40417.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-12-07 21:26 Subject: [research] Draft conference paper: Fanwork as a test case for open source cultural goods Security: Public Mood: awake Tags: commodification, fanwork, open source, paper, research

On Nov. 27-28, the Japan Association for Cultural Economics organized the first edition of a yearly workshop at Doshisha University, Kyoto, to fill the long gap between its big yearly conferences. I presented a draft paper titled 'Fanwork as a test case for open source cultural goods'.

This paper is a follow-up on my recent symposium piece 'Why we should talk about commodifying fan work', more precisely this footnote:

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This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/40181.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-12-07 14:14 Subject: [research] Piece in TWC: Why we should talk about commodifying fan work Security: Public Mood: energetic Tags: paper, research

The new issue of Transformative Works and Cultures was published last month and includes a symposium piece by me:

Why we should talk about commodifying fan work

Summary:

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This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/39918.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-11-18 10:22 Subject: [otw] 12 hours left to vote! Security: Public Mood: busy Tags: otw

Less than 12 hours until the polls close, everyone. Cast your vote, it matters. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/38880.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-11-13 11:16 Subject: Last-minute OTW elections thing Security: Public Mood: determined Tags: fandom, law, otw

In this post:

*Grumblings about the "I don't speak for the OTW" disclaimer and about diversity
*Very lengthy rantings about copyright legislation and why the OTW should do its utmost to make sure all fans feel comfortable approaching it for tools and resources
*An endorsement of Betsy Rosenblatt for the board

If you're pressed for time, please skip the grumblings and rantings and go straight to the endorsement. Lucy Pearson withdrew her candidacy while I was writing this, so I feel it's doubly important to stress why Betsy deserves a vote. Also, general_jinjur explained the OTW's voting system with pictures of smarties on a pai sho board yay very clear graphical representations, and what it comes down to is, the order in which we rank candidates during voting can matter a lot.

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This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/38177.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-10-18 22:48 Subject: [kill me now] Fanfiction.net is weak and Fanfic.me is ready to take over their marketplace Security: Public Mood: amused Tags: fail, fanfic.me

Fanfic.me hasn't done anything new or exciting since it was first discussed, but here's something that may be of interest, or at least extremely amusing. Hidden on Fandom Entertainment's website are three videos that give an overview of Fanfic.me and its aims, introduce the team behind Fanfic.me, and show a demo of how a fic writer would use the site. They're all about two minutes long and very much worth watching.

Favourite quotes, from the overview video:

We are poised to become THE fan fiction site not only online, but across all mobile devices.

There's one site that dominates the fan fiction marketplace [screenshot of fanfiction.net]. But they are weak, due to tech problems and lack of updates, lack of graphic branding, and other problems. Their site ranking of three fifty has been sliding for over a year, and they are weak, and we are ready to take over their marketplace.

...

Giving fans what they want. We're Fandom Entertainment.

Date: 2011-10-14 20:09 Subject: [random] Master Piandao approves of donations to the OTW Security: Public Mood: productive Tags: otw

Any time is a good time to donate to and/or become a member of the OTW. But everyone who gives $10 or more before October 17 can vote in next month's elections, so right now would be an especially good time.

Support amateur artists and donate!


 

Date: 2011-10-12 13:33 Subject: [random] Fanfic.me has a Fanlore page Security: Public Mood: amused Tags: fanfic.me

I completely forgot to mention that elf has made a Fanlore page for Fanfic.me. Gathering info over there is much more efficient in the long run than keeping things in a bunch of DW entries, so I'm in the process of moving all the verifiable facts we have to Fanlore. Please do feel free to edit the page to bits! I don't have copious amounts of time available right now, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Latest news: Fanfic.me was down for a couple of days and is now back with a new design but no new content, and today Fansitepress.com has been taken offline as well. Maybe it will be back before Fanfic.me takes part in the Web 2.0 Expo New York startup showcase. The startup showcase is at 5:10pm on October 12. I may get out of bed in time for it, just in case there's tweeting.

We've been taking this whole thing quite seriously since the initial hilarity. Just for fun, have a quote from the front page of Gleeklub.com, another one of Fandom Entertainment's two hundred sites:

Date: 2011-10-10 12:27 Subject: [watch this video] The security mirage Security: Public Mood: chipper Tags: japan, security, watch this video

Not doing much writing at the moment. I'm busy reading up on open source licensing and open source project management for research purposes and more personal reasons (I'm getting involved in an open source project and want to be more useful). So, have another video!

The general gist of this talk is familiar: how secure we feel often doesn't match how secure we actually are. But it's a very good summary of exactly where this discrepancy comes from, when it's most likely to occur, how it persists, and what we can do about it. I love videos that summarize everything worth remembering about a given topic, and point out how it relates to other issues in ways that seem obvious in hindsight but just didn't occur to me before. (More rambling after the video)

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Like the link between incorrect perception of risk and the very existence of modern media that's pointed out here. There are a lot of news outlets that make a deliberate effort to sensationalize everything, which makes people feel that one-in-a-million occurrences could very well happen to them. That seems obvious. But it's not just sensationalist news that skews our perception of how likely we are to get personally involved in some freakishly rare event; it's the very concept of news media. The more we hear about something, the more we assume that it's likely to happen to us as well, and the whole idea of news media is to tell everyone about happenings that were extraordinary. Things that were rare enough to be newsworthy.

In a way, every single thing that ends up in any kind of news is sensationalist. No matter how dryly and objectively a quality media outlet manages to report on something, it's still going to make us more likely to feel that this something might happen to us as well. You can get a pretty good idea of the kind of risks you run in a certain place just by living there for a while, but once there's a newspaper to tell you of the things that happened in Other Place, you start overestimating the likelihood that those things could happen where you are. The problem isn't that bad news outlets scare people for no reason, it's that news outlets (quality or not) exist in the first place. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't have news, of course, just that we need to keep in mind that no matter how carefully we select our news sources, news is always going to be sensationalist by its very nature.

(Applying this to an example that's relevant to me right now: my advisor is organizing a conference here in Kyoto in November, and there were almost no responses to the call for papers from outside Japan, while she normally gets lots of those. The only explanation we can think of is that people are afraid to visit Japan because of the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. This seems incredibly weird from my point of view. However, even those who have only read the most non-sensationalist and accurate descriptions of the nuclear crisis are still going to overestimate the risk of coming to Japan, because they've been bombarded with news about Fukushima while hearing nothing of the situation in the other 46 prefectures of Japan. Even if we inform them now that Kyoto is hundreds of miles away and completely unaffected by the disaster, and they believe us, they're still going to overestimate the risk of coming to Japan simply because they've heard Fukushima mentioned more often than Kyoto.)

Anyway, most of this talk isn't about news media at all, but that was the part that jumped out to me.


Found via Sociological Images.</div>
This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/37045.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-10-08 21:54 Subject: [research] Post about Comiket at Symposium blog Security: Public Mood: geeky Tags: comiket, dojinshi, research

Comiket as a market for fanworks

Introductory post about Comiket, written for TWC's Symposium blog. Since most people have at least some idea of what generally happens at cons, I decided to skip descriptions of the cosplay and such in favor of focusing on how fanworks are sold at Comiket and how Japanese dojinshi fans relate to rights holders. That should be a bit more interesting. I got some numbers out of the Comiket catalog about what people earn by producing and selling their dojinshi (in short, the majority lose money), which I'll talk about in more detail over here in a week or so. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/36685.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-10-07 10:22 Subject: [watch this video] Tropes vs. Women: #6 The Straw Feminist Security: Public Mood: busy Tags: feminism, media, watch this video

Via Sociological Images, original Feminist Frequency post with extra links here. I want to keep a dedicated little video-playing device in my pocket just so I can show this to every person who utters the phrase "I'm not a feminist, but" or wants me to justify my calling myself a feminist because "most" feminists are, you know, you know?

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This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/36490.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-10-03 17:54 Subject: [research, fanstuff] Drama week wrapup: research links at Pinboard now, Fanfic.me still unbelievable Security: Public Tags: bookmarking, diigo, fail, fanfic.me, fanstuff, pinboard, research

My apologies for throwing out no less than five not very cheerful posts in a single week. I promise to be less displeased with the world from now on. Just a few quick notes about the new location of my research and fannish bookmarks:

• My Diigo account still exists because it contains some collaborative bookmark collections whose new home is still being prepared. Also, there are a lot of links in various work-related locations going to that account, so I may end up just leaving it as it is. However, it will no longer be updated. My new primary bookmarks account is here at Pinboard.
• The research-related bookmarks link at the right and on my profile now points to http://pinboard.in/u:fanficforensics/t:phd, and the new RSS feed is here.
• Non-research-related links at the old Diigo account were usually private, including links to fanworks. I've decided to leave links to fanworks public from now on because I want to take more part in the fannish bookmarking fun - I only watched and never contributed on Delicious because keeping track of several different bookmarking accounts never worked out for me. So, there's suddenly a bunch of fic in my bookmarking account, but I expect that won't be a problem for anyone. People who follow this journal for the research updates will already be well aware of what fic is. The revelation that I read it shouldn't come as a shock. I'll be more careful about tagging bookmarks with adult content from now on.

Date: 2011-10-02 16:04 Subject: [rant] Taking a short break from laughing at Fanfic.me Security: Public Mood: determined Tags: commodification, economy, fail, fanfic.me

Okay, Fanfic.me is utterly hilarious, but they deserve a proper rend-and-tear post anyway. They put so much effort into their... thing. No, really, they did! It's all part of a cunning long-term plan!

Many thanks again to watersword for all the sleuthing work. A lot of the info in this post was already in her awesome write-up from yesterday, and in the comments to said write-up. I did some more digging because I want to be a plucky girl detective too.

EDIT 3/10: A few people have correctly pointed out that the limits of my personal fannish experience are showing in the way I interpret the fannish background of people behind Fanfic.me. Qualifiying statement about why I chose to call them "not fans" here. Also, there's some extra info about Fanfic.me's money-making strategy at the bottom of the post now.

EDIT 5/10: Huge batch of edits at the bottom of the post, including links to lots of new Fanfic.me pages and discussion of problems with the software being used. And another qualifying statement about the use of "fannish" in this post. Sorry, people, I didn't realize at first posting that I made a couple of snap judgements and inadvertedly made it sound like this is all about the fannish background of the Fanfic.me people. It definitely isn't.

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EDIT 4/10 2: Fanfic.me has posted a TOS now (elf notes that it's the same TOS as on MyFandoms.com). The TOS, which Fanfic.me calls a TSA, appears to be kind of dreadful.

BUNCH OF EDITS 5/10: Lots more things going on at the original post. Fic posted by elf to Fanfic.me got bahleeted, she got mail implying that her content is not welcome in the community Fanfic.me founders are part of.

On the software side, it seems that the code of the Wordpress plugin offered by Fansitepress.com is being kept under wraps in violation of the GPL licence (EDIT 5/10 Or perhaps not). Claims that much work and years of development (founders contradict each other about the time frame here and here) went into the plugin appear to be false, as the plugin was only released and pulled from the Wordpress.org site again in February 2011, and seems to add extremely little functionality to the kind of Wordpress install offered by Wordpress.com (which Fansitepress.com seems to be confusing with itself.) See links in EDIT 4/10 for some appraisals of the plugin's functionality, and here for links to where it can be seen in action (EDIT 5/10 The links are no longer active. We appear to be under surveillance. I think we should get credit for beta-testing this product and suggesting so many improvements). On this new page, Jacky Abromitis claims that the old Fan Fic Fan software was bad because "Unfortunately, we built it on a really lousy open source platform". She then proceeds to wax poetic about their new Wordpress plugin without mentioning that Wordpress is also open source.

Fanfic.me has just published some new pages: founders, blog, and privacy. All are well worth a look. Will link to more discussion about them later, no time for extensive analysis ATM. What struck me the most after a quick first read is the 'founders' piece, in which Jacky Abromitis discusses at length why her venture is beneficial for the fan community, and why she thinks the concerns of fans who think "Fanfiction should never be about “business”" are not relevant here. She appears to be quite knowledgable about the history of fanwork commodification. Interpretations about the content of this text may vary. But personally, I'm becoming more and more convinced that she knows exactly what she's doing, why the way she's going about this can be harmful to fandom in ways I've already outlined, and why we're criticizing her.

watersword and elf have pointed out that Jacky Abromitis appears to be reading the original post. No idea if she may be reading here as well, but just FYI.
 

watersword

I would really appreciate it if we could stop trying to determine if Abromitis is “fannish enough” — at this point it seems pretty clear that Abromitis is Not One Of Us in a different way than Chris and David Williams of Fanlib were Not One Of Us. The point remains that Fandom Entertainment, the company, owns sites which (a) approach the line in the sand which many fans have drawn vis-a-vis commerce and fandom, but that’s a personal mileage thing, and for all I know, her fannish community is more comfortable with the intersection of capitalism and fandom than I am; I would still like an explanation of WTF she hopes to achieve by attending the NY Expo Startup Showcase; (b) commercially exploit fans who may not know better (disregarding the Tolkien estate and Disney and Warner Bros. entirely, I am comfortable making a blanket statement that tricking your fellow fans into paying for unnecessary services is not cool); and (c) are not very good fanfiction archives.

EDIT 12/10: Forgot to mention that elf has made a Fanlore page for Fanfic.me. Gathering info over there is much more efficient in the long run than keeping things in a bunch of DW entries, so I'm in the process of moving all the verifiable facts we have to Fanlore. Please do feel free to edit the page to bits! I don't have copious amounts of time available right now, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Latest news: Fanfic.me was down for a couple of days and is now back with a new design but no new content, and today Fansitepress.com has been taken offline as well. Maybe it will be back before Fanfic.me takes part in today's Web 2.0 Expo New York startup showcase. (Note: my time zone is 14 hours ahead of New York, so this 12/10 edit is really a 11/10 edit from a US point of view.)

Date: 2011-10-02 00:30 Subject: [research] Oh look, another Fanlib. Security: Public Mood: tired Tags: commodification, economy

Fanfic.me appears to be a company that tries to coax people into posting fanfic on its site so it can market visitor eyeballs to advertisers. watersword has a ton of details here.

In-depth analysis and mockery will have to happen after a good night's sleep, because right now my brain can't seem to get past how incredibly hideous that site design is. So much orange. Ugliest banner ever. Why. And I don't know if there are even any real people over there, the profile names of the fic authors aren't clickable and all the comments seem to have been made by Fanfic.me itself. Did they just harvest stories from FF.net and change the author names? I tried googling the first sentence of a couple of the fics, and they were all posted to FF.net or deviantART under different author names. 

Regardless, this one looks like a really special train wreck. It's... kind of pathetically cute, the way they throw "fanfic" around as a keyword, as if it's a magic spell that will draw all the "fanfic" writers to their site. Look at the way they keep using it as a hashtag on their Twitter account. I almost feel sorry for them, they're so obviously ignorant and incompetent and doomed and unable to see what's coming their way.

EDIT of no, still not sleeping: There's a lot more discussion/sleuthing going on inwatersword's post, includingfranzeska digging up a hilarious news article about Fanfic.me.

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/35740.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-09-30 12:55 Subject: [fanstuff, random] Diigofail, the reckoning: export from Diigo and all private bookmarks turn public Security: Public Mood: enraged Tags: bookmarking, diigo, fail, pinboard, privacy

So, I got a Pinboard account and imported my 9843 Diigo bookmarks. All 3244 of my private bookmarks showed up as public on Pinboard. Confused, I took a closer look at Pinboard's explanation of its import function, which indeed states that imported private bookmarks will remain private.

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This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/35461.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-09-28 12:42 Subject: [fanstuff, random] No, wait. I really do want a bookmarking service of our own now Security: Public Mood: infuriated Tags: bookmarking, diigo, education, research, silencing

After I ruminated on why Diigo is probably not a good haven for fannish bookmarks, lian linked to this report. Apparently, Diigo has an algorithm in place that automatically turns private any bookmarks that contain 'inappropriate' words like 'sex' or 'sexy'.

This was news to me. I have no idea when this algorithm was implemented; it seems to be another one of those magic rule/feature changes that Diigo sometimes trots out without warning. I went to have a closer look at my Diigo bookmarks, and indeed, every bookmark with 'sex' in the title has been turned private. I never received any sort of notification or explanation about this.

The full list of bookmarks I'm not allowed to show the world is over here, and it contains links such as:
( Read more... )</user> This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/35136.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-09-28 10:31 Subject: [fanstuff, random] On (not) moving to Diigo after #deliciousfail Security: Public Mood: busy Tags: bookmarking

Apparently the new delicious is not very useful in very many ways, and people are migrating. Many seem to be mentioning Pinboard and Diigo. I've never used Pinboard, but I have used Diigo intensively since 2007. It's a shiny service with a lot of very useful functionality, so much of it that I'm still not sure I can bear to leave it behind completely. (EDIT: Now I'm sure.)

It's not a good port in a storm for fannish bookmarks, though. I'm sure of that much. Of course all bookmarking services have their problems, and I don't mean to blow Diigo's out of proportion - again, the things you can do with bookmarks on that service are pretty amazing, and I'm still half in love with it myself.

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Diigo is cool in very many ways, but it's not geared towards fans and my experiences with it haven't given me reason to believe that they would understand or take into account the concerns of fannish users. Personally, I'd caution against re-building any lost fannish infrastructure over there.

Now I'm going to check out Pinboard and see what that's like. Talk about the AO3 bookmarking feature being expanded or even a totally new fannish bookmarking service project is really music to my ears, though. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/34862.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Date: 2011-09-27 21:13 Subject: [research] $89 for an e-book and I'm not even allowed to see my highlights? Security: Public Mood: aggravated Tags: academia, amazon, e-books, publishing, research

I recently bought the Kindle edition of this book. $89 for an e-book is beyond obscene, but I rather desperately needed it for research and there was still room in the budget. I considered getting it as a one-month rental for the equally obscene price of $40, but the rentals page explained that the number of highlights that can be made in a rental book is sometimes limited, and I have a tendency to highlight and annotate about half of everything.

This book, by the way, is the 'official' publication of a PhD thesis that used to be available online for free - I found references and broken links to it from 2008. It's a very interesting and relevant work, and it makes me weep to know that scholars have to lock up this kind of research in $89 vaults just because they need 'real' publications to keep their careers alive.

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This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/34809.html. Please comment there using OpenID.