Academic Publishing in the Digital Age
HASTAC Forum, running NOW through November 16

Following from October's discussion of the importance of Fair Use, this forum will offer an opportunity to extend the dialogue about new challenges and opportunities in academic publishing today. As established print journals tend toward expensive and restricted subscriptions in response to current technological and financial conditions, a counter-movement is growing in support of online access to scholarship as a public good, led by open electronic journals and databases. Are traditional journals a relic of a pre-internet era, or does their publication model still have value in academia? How can either system be economically viable? Given that strict liability copyright standards are a hurdle for print journals, do electronic journals provide a necessary haven for the citation and transformation of proprietary artifacts and work? In a context where everyone can have a blog or home page, what do students and scholars need to know about the benefits and risks of self-publishing? And perhaps most importantly, what new possibilities for intellectual and creative work are capacitated by the web as a platform?

This goal of this forum is to explore the shifting definition of academic publishing in the digital age, as well as to consider the intellectual, creative and technical challenges which digital platforms pose for scholarly publication. The conversation will be co-hosted by HASTAC Scholars Chris Hanson of USC, who has worked for the online journal Vectors, and Julie Levin Russo of Brown, who works for the online journal Transformative Works and Cultures. They will be joined by other members of these publications' editorial and creative teams, including Kristina Busse, Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer. Vectors is an international electronic journal that brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, publishing works realized in multimedia that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. Transformative Works and Cultures is an Open Access international electronic journal on popular media and fan communities published by the Organization for Transformative Works, and invites authors to embrace the technical possibilities of the web and test the limits of academic writing. Both publications are copyrighted under Creative Commons licenses.

We hope to facilitate a venue in which we may all ask and answer questions about the present and future of digital scholarship. Please come join the discussion at http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-02-08Academic-Publishing-in-the-Digital-Age

I'm delighted to announce that I have been selected as one of this year's HASTAC Scholars! I will be posting regular videoblog entries about web technologies and participatory learning here starting sometime this week. I encourage you to engage with the work of all the HASTAC Scholars, as well as the organization's other exciting projects.

Also, I will be attending the LA Queer Studies Conference on October 10-11. Allow me to call special attention to my panel, which falls bright and early at 9:00-10:30am on Saturday morning:

Mediated Queer Socialities and Identities
Moderator: Mary L. Gray, Indiana University, Communication and Culture

Julie Levin Russo [my correction], Brown University, Modern Culture and Media
Labors of Love: Economies of Identity in The L Word’s Fan-Driven Online Promotions

Alexis Lothian, University of Southern California, English
Doing Boys Like They’re Girls, and Other (Trans)Gendered Subjects: The Queer Subcultural Politics of “Genderfuck” Fan Fiction

Jill A. Bakehorn, UC Davis, Sociology
Bordering on Activism: Authenticity and Identity Politics in Women-Made Porn

fearless leaders,

This is your fall update on my progress! I'm dismayed to report that it's much slower than I'd planned. I swear you don't have to lecture me: I do understand the importance of protecting time for my dissertation, it's just a learning process to actually put that in practice. about 50% of my distractions are of direct professional usefulness, at least. And one heartening trend is that I get miserable when I'm not moving forward at least a little, so that's an excellent motivator. I am writing, and I'm very aware that I need to figure out how to write faster.

I'm working on my Battlestar Galactica/media archaeology chapter, which has three body sections: the theoretical scaffolding, analysis of the show's text and context (much of this repurposed from earlier talks), and new discussion of fan videos (plus a short intro and conclusion which I'll write last). I have one more bit to go on the latter, which will be finished by the 15th. [links] After wrapping us this third I'm jumping back to the theory section (even though the TV section is easier/faster), because I realized that it's difficult sorting out how to frame my discussion without having hashed that out. I'm meeting with [whkc] soon so that should be an invaluable kickstart!

[redacted: Jenkins post, plans for publication, conferences]

Finally, as I understand it, it would behoove me to apply for some external fellowships for next year (some of which may have november deadlines). Last I heard the funding situation was optimistic but still uncertain, with precedence definitely given to 6th year students with some outside money. Other than the UCLA film/TV archive research stipend, which I'll probably apply for despite the difficulty of making the case that I need to do archival research, I have no idea how to go about this. I was going to start with these links: http://del.icio.us/tag/fellowships. Help?

Plus [LJ] and I are organizing a Flow special issue. See how this month is crazy?? I will try to a more vigilant dissertator in future. Schedule-wise, I'm planning to be in LA November 9-December 14, then back on the east coast for the holiday season.

[another version of the abstract for the ongoing BSG project, submitted to SCMS]

Love is television's reproductive technology: yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry, TV depends for its self-perpetuation on our desire for its endlessly multiplying texts. On the SciFi channel series Battlestar Galactica, love is likewise the cybernetic Cylons' reproductive technology, since they believe that only cross-species romance could produce Hera, the first Cylon-human hybrid baby and "the shape of things to come." Hybridity is "the shape of things to come" for broadcast media as well: it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with exclusive online content, offering television intensified opportunities to proliferate its texts and its intercourse with fans. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor within an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition.

This paper analyzes and contrasts an official fan filmmaking contest on the Battlestar Galactica website and fan music videos created in the context of online communities. Videomaker Toolkit exemplifies the industry's dance of permissiveness and containment, while fan works demonstrate that the text's open networks, like the Fleet's networked computers, are vulnerable to unorthodox technologies of love. I focus particularly on the queerness of Battlestar Galactica's alternative families (both on- and offscreen), which becomes increasingly notable as television learns that its offspring can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they're orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.

BSG, Videomaker, and fanvids foreground the ways that both Cylons and fans are threatening because they're in networked communication with technology, and because their desires to be mediated dispute sanctioned boundaries and generate rogue progeny. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives like Videomaker, with their intrinsic compromises and contradictions, can adequately contain and channel these desires. I will argue that, even though fan activities (whether literally or metaphorically queer) are thoroughly implicated in television's consumer economy, there are aspects of their queer families that are unavailable to capitalist poaching.

I'd like to congratulate my students (and myself!) on a triumphant end to the semester. Their acumen, enthusiasm, and commitment were a delight and an inspiration. You can read much of their work at http://tvhere.livejournal.com (I especially recommend the midterm projects!).

as for THIS week's kerfuffle -- I haven't gotten a chance to read any of the FanLib posts yet, mea culpa, but I am saving them in del.icio.us for future diss research. The L Word fan-written script was of course the company's first major project, so doubtless I'll have plenty to say about such issues when I come to chapter 4.

meanwhile, look for me on Henry Jenkins' blog later this summer (in the aftermath of another recent kerfuffle).