Quick update: I'm alive, let the dissertation writing begin

[unjapanologist]

I've got a little more than a year to go with my PhD on dojinshi, so it's high time to start writing the final dissertation and put more concrete results out on the internets. It's more motivating to write in public, and of course I also hope that people will come in and poke me with corrections or suggestions while there's still time to take those comments into account. (Please do, I will love you forever and credit you all over the place. And make thank-you drabbles/drawbles if you want any.)

My online presence has changed quite a bit over the last few years, so I thought I'd give a quick update about where to get info or updates about the research:

• I've started writing the dissertation and am posting short daily updates about progress on Tumblr, with links to the stuff that's been done.
• Unjapanologist's Dojinshi Research is the wiki where I'm drafting my dissertation.
• This Dreamwidth journal is updated only now and then when there's something bigger to report, and I don't forget to report it - times are busy. My apologies for the sparse updates here. Please check out the wiki or Tumblr for the most recent stuff.
• Shorter or more incoherent things go into Twitter
• Various notes and quotes for research that haven't been processed anywhere else yet are in an online notes and quotes book.
• Other academic works and projects I've done up to now are on Academia.edu, with full text copies of articles, links to all presentations etc etc.

Quick basics: my PhD research focuses on doujinshi, Japanese print fanworks that are often sold for money with the tacit approval of copyright holders. I frame doujinshi exchange as a hybrid economy that straddles fannish gift economies and commercial economies. By comparing these fanworks with other kinds of works that are exchanged in such “hybrid” economies, like open source software, I’m developing a vocabulary for explaining fanworks as a sort of “open source cultural goods” that fit in very well with many other “open” movements today. Open source is already a well-known and well-understood mechanism for “non-professionals” to create valuable things for the sake of fun and community instead of for profit, while still interacting in a mutually beneficial way with the commercial economy as well. I’m convinced that framing fanworks as part of an “open” movement should be very helpful in explaining (also to non-fannish open culture activists, policymakers, and so on) what role fanworks play in the broader cultural economy.

*ties on victory bandana*

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Congratulations!

I don't do Tumblr unless someone links to it, but I am cheering you on from here! :)

[unjapanologist]

Thanks! ;) I'm vaguely considering crossposting the tumblr updates to here, but not sure if people would be very delighted to see very short research updates cluttering up their flists every day.

[sanet]

Sounds fascinating! I wouldn't mind cross-posted Tumblr updates here. I think it's a brave but entirely appropriate thing to post dissertation work on dojin and open source culture through social media as you go. The more cross-connections, the better!

[unjapanologist]

Somehow I keep feeling that a brief Tumblr update isn't substantial enough for DW. Let me work through that for a bit and I'll reconsider ;)