Unjapanologist

Here's my presentation for SGMS (Schoolgirls and Mobile Suits), which is going on right now in Minneapolis. On the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement's possible legal threat to dojinshi exchange, and one of the solutions that are being tried in Japan - the dojin mark, a kind of license for fanworks. Which I will blog about as soon as I have a brain again.

The European Fandom & Fan Studies Conference took place on November 10, 2012 at the University of Amsterdam. It was a relatively small one-day conference, but great in terms of content and people present. I was especially pleased to see so many researchers going beyond English-language online fandoms, tackling offline fan activities or doing comparative studies with other online fandoms that communicate in different languages. There was also a strong emphasis on how fans interact with media industries and deal with fannish activities that involve money, which is one of my favorite topics. I heard a ton of interesting ideas, and others clearly did too.

But I'll let our past selves speak for themselves. Here's a Storify with all the tweets from the #eurofandom tag, grouped by presentation as much as possible.

There were a couple of participants tweeting at least semi-regularly, and I'm surprised at how much of what happened at the conference comes across pretty well by looking at the tweets. With just a handful of Twitter-happy attendees plus Storify, it's very easy to leave a permanent record of the goings-on at any conference for anyone who wants or needs to see what was said there.

It's not a perfect system. The technology has to work, obviously; I attend plenty of conferences were wifi is still not assumed to be necessary, and even at this one, the network was a bit troublesome. Conferences with parallel panels also need at least a small group to cover everything more or less thoroughly. There were a couple of presentations during which all the really active tweeters happened to be in a different room, or temporarily comatose because of jetlag in my case, and these presentations are conspicuously absent from the timeline. Perhaps conferences should make a bigger deal out of live-tweeting to encourage more people to pick up the slack? And designate a conference historian to make the Storify later on.

(Crossposted from the Symposium blog)

While in Washington DC last July, I had the very great pleasure of attending AdaCamp, an unconference* about women in open technology and culture organized by the Ada Initiative. AdaCamp was a real eye-opener. It was thrilling to meet dozens of other people who were interested in fan/remix culture as part of a broader (conscious or unconscious) movement towards open culture, and I walked away with so many ideas that it kind of made my head explode and I still haven't gotten past part one of my conference write-up.**

In short, it was fantastic, not in the least because the organizers had explicitly invited people from fannish backgrounds and created a very welcoming atmosphere. That enabled us to launch right into talking about fan culture and open stuff without any of the non-fannish people questioning whether we belonged at a "techie" unconference. Any fan who's even vaguely interested in open stuff should have the opportunity to attend an event like this. Your head will explode and it will feel great.

Fortunately for all of us, the Ada Initiative is holding a donation drive right now to bolster their long-term finances so they can organize more AdaCamps in as many different locations as possible. DC was the second AdaCamp. The first took place in Melbourne, and the organizers are hoping to branch out to Europe and India.

Holding AdaCamp in such disparate locations is the only way to really attract the sort of diversity that the Ada Initiative says it wants to achieve. There were travel grants to help attendees with the costs for AdaCamp DC, but even then, the number of such grants is always limited and they're rarely sufficient to allow people from truly far away to reach the conference. I only managed to attend because I was a panelist at another conference in Boston and my plane ticket to the US was already paid.

I'll be living in Europe next year and I want to go to AdaCamp If you can, please consider donating so AdaCamp can happen somewhere near you. You want to go!

I'll post again when the next edition is announced. Donating is absolutely not required if you want to attend, by the way, and they'll waive the conference fee if it's keeping you from participating.


*An unconference is a conference where attendees decide what they want to talk about on the spot instead of speakers arriving with prepared remarks. The format has its downsides, but it's wonderful for making everyone feel enough at ease to contribute what they want to say.
**In general, the more energized I am by something, the less capable I am of sitting down and writing about it. In related news, I've decided to put data gathering and analysis on the back burner for a few months and work on communicating better about my research. Yeah.

On my way to the US right now.* The program has ballooned a bit: I won't just be talking at Console-Ing Passions in Boston, but also participating in AdaCamp and attending Wikimania, both in Washington DC.

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The Kyoto International Manga Museum live-streamed its conference on the "virtual children" problem earlier today -the video is still available here. It was a good symposium, with many of the most important problems of this proposed legislation being explained by some very knowledgable people. I'm writing a longer post after I've gotten my grubby hands on a summary of Ito Go's presentation -he was the only one who spoke a bit too quickly and indistinctly for me to follow, and I don't want to misrepresent his words. For now, just a quick word on one of the topics raised that resonated the most with me: what happens when people are unwillingly faced with sexual imagery in public places.
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This post is abominally late, yes, and I have multiple fine excuses, but let's skip that part. Three weeks ago the conference Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities was held at Umea University, Sweden, in the gorgeous HUMlab space. It was a very inspiring experience, and I've been trying to string together a million separate thoughts about it without becoming totally incoherent. This resulted in a mile-long text chock full of links that no sane person would ever wade through, so I'll be splitting it up and publishing it in installments. (Also because if I delay posting until the text is entirely finished, I won't be posting for another week at least, which would be a tad pathetic.) So, first things first -the conference in general and my reason for being there.

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Originally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.

I'm having a great time in Kyoto at "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale", the first international conference on manga/comics research at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, organised by Kyoto Seika University. Met a ton of interesting people with very interesting ideas that I'll write about in length later.

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