Unjapanologist

Or more like the last three days, though I spent most of the weekend with the Pacific Rim novelization and nursing a sudden fascination for Herc Hansen. The novel is not very well-written, but it satisfied that fannish craving for ALL THE DETAILS.

• Solved display issues with list of Japanese-English fandom terminology
• Added quotes, sources, structure and/or random sentences to various pages, including research ethics, history of dojinshi, and the lit review (oh just see the recent changes page)
• Added some quick Japanese to the front page of the wiki because there was a sudden flood of visitors from Japan after someone posted a link to it on 2channel. Whee!
• Added comments section to main page of wiki in case people want to use that for general remarks. Not quite sure it's a good idea, but I can always remove it in the unlikely case that it's trolled by unhelpful people.
• Read the Association for Internet Researchers' 2012 Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research report for research ethics section. Good that there's an updated version of this, I only had the older version at the start of the research.
• Re-gathered old sources on research ethics in fan studies. Can't find anything in Japanese though, just English. Hmmm.
  
• Spent a lot of time trawling through Google Books and its suggestions to dig up Japanese how-to books about doujinshi and other fanworks that I hadn't found before. These books are so useful - they're basically "here are all the details about how doujinshi work, researcher person", and there are enough of them that you can get many different POVs. And the Japanese is accessible enough that I can read it very easily. I can read academic articles too, but they still require an amount of concentration that's just on this side of unpleasant.
  

• Finally, finally finished uploading all presentations into university repository. Though I forgot to add keywords to several. I suppose I should go back and fix that.


• Bibliography fiddling is paying off! Finally got a nice display and working import and export. Hopefully I can upload everything next week.


• Read From Dissertation to Book by William Germano. Interesting but repetitive.


• Re-read Fanwork as a test case for open source cultural goods, an old but highly relevant conference paper that never got published properly, and started chopping it into pieces that can go straight into the dissertation draft.

• Added about 35 words to the glossary of Japanese <-> English fandom terminology.
• Started reading 「同人界」の論理－行為者の利害-関心と資本の変換－ (Logic of the fan community) by Nobushige Hichibe, which is about the motivations of doujinshi creators.
• Added a few presentations to university repository. This took so much time that I left the rest of the presentations for tomorrow because I could feel my brain shriveling up. You'd think that since we have bibtex, all repositories or services aimed at academics would allow bibtex import and export, and we'd be done with endlessly hand-copying academic output to wherever it needs to be listed. I suppose that would be too convenient or something. (Academia.edu also has no bibtex import and export, by the way. A few other academic networking services can handle bibtex, but everybody in area studies and fan studies seems to be on Academia.edu. *grumble*)
• Started work on the section on doujinshi exchange infrastructure, specifically doujinshi conventions. Not linking to wiki because the page looks weird because of a random baffling Semantic Mediawiki glitch. Nggggh. Really, I love learning new software, and getting to the bottom of Mediawiki myself instead of asking someone else to set up a wiki has taught me so much. But why does it always break. (Because I'm not good enough at Mediawiki administration yet, I know, but.)
• Did a good deal of research on how to rework a dissertation into a book, sent inquiry to publisher to see how they feel about book manuscripts based on dissertations that have been published open access.
• Agreed to submit something for Console-Ing Passions 2014, ruminated on good topic. Unfortunately too tired to ruminate properly today.

It has become commonplace for English-language studies about Japanese- and English-speaking fans of manga to mention that the Internet in general and social networking services (SNSs) in particular play a crucial role for the functioning of contemporary "transcultural" fan communities. DeviantART and pixiv, for instance, are two famous image-based SNSs that have become hubs for very active fan communities centered around the exchange of fannish visual media. Such services are not just convenient places to socialize and maintain fan communities, but also distribution systems whose functionality is geared exactly towards what fans want to do with the works they create: share them, and have them appreciated and talked about by other fans.

Several recent studies have focused on how fans use SNSs as communication hubs or as distribution platforms. However, it may be misleading to present these two functions as wholly separate, as no more than the “Internet versions” of pre-digital forms of communication and distribution. Research on the nature and effects of interactions around media on SNSs shows that the “digital conversations” that take place on SNSs have their own particular characteristics that influence what can be said, who can say it, and what the results of the conversation can be. These characteristics profoundly influence not just the interpretations of media distributed through these services, but also the very content of the media themselves.

In this chapter, I make a first attempt at clarifying the complex ways in which the particular nature of digital conversations (boyd and Heer 2006) works to influence fannish interactions on SNSs, with a special focus on how these digital conversations on SNSs help or hinder transcultural interactions between Japanese- and English-speaking fans of manga, comics and other media. I conduct a comparative case study of digital conversations around a particular kind of fanwork that is often distributed and discussed through SNSs: fan-created comics and manga (also called doujinshi). More specifically, I focus on "Harry Potter"-based fan-created comics and manga distributed via deviantART and pixiv.

As reported by Anime News Network and others, Japanese animation studio TRIGGER's Kickstarter campaign to make a sequel episode to their Little Witch Academia OAV met its goal of $150.000 in less than five hours. The Kickstarter is at $285.000 right now, with a whopping 28 days still left to go.

Similar changes are eroding literary publication as direct electronic publication by authors on the Internet has led to erotic and reportedly pornographic works like Fifty Shades of Grey and spinoffs sweeping bestsellers lists for months. The issue is not whether erotica or pornography is or should be popular; rather, one wonders what literary work might have filled those slots on the bestsellers lists if traditional mechanisms of editor-evaluated publication had been applied, which consider more than simply the potential popularity of a work in deciding what to publish.