unjapanologist: (fetchez la vache)
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*
unjapanologist: (Default)
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)
unjapanologist: (fetchez la vache)
Today my Twitter account managed to send out a phishing direct message to much of my follower list. That was terribly embarrassing and I have no idea how it happened, but Twitter apparently shut it down after a few minutes, and several alert and friendly people poked me so I could dive in and change my password. I felt very loved by this friendly alertness. I apologized to all of Twitter, had a drink, and went back to work.

Three hours later, I'm still getting e-mails and direct messages about my account possibly being hacked. I really, truly appreciate so many people taking the time to try and help me. But I have to reply to the DMs with public tweets, because Twitter has apparently banned my account from sending private messages for the time being. Which makes sense, but at this point, it's really starting to feel like they want to teach me a lesson by forcing me into constant public shaming and groveling until every last one of my nicer followers has sent me a concerned DM.

Internet cookies for everyone who contacted me! Cookies with extra chocolate chips for the winners of the alertness race! First place goes to [personal profile] marina, second to [personal profile] lizbee, and [personal profile] anatsuno and [personal profile] copracat share third.

Thank you, everyone, truly. And I really am sorry and very embarrassed. Please make it stop now?

sadkitten.gif
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unjapanologist: (fetchez la vache)
The MLA (Modern Language Association), has updated its widely-used citation guidelines for academic papers with a citation style for tweets:

Read more... )
unjapanologist: (Default)
Two years after signing up and then losing interest after a day or so, I finally found a use for Twitter -recording all the small, maybe-insignificant, not-thought-through-in-the-slightest research ideas that come dropping out of the sky every day but are way to insignificant to blog about. I can never seem to blog about anything unless I have a lot of free time and manage to convince myself that I can say something intelligent and relevant about the topic at hand, circumstances that seem to coincide relatively rarely. Anyone interested in hearing five to ten random thoughts of dubious relevancy about Harry Potter dojinshi per day is very welcome to follow me here.

I also did a partial overhaul of the main website. Read more... )

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