http://genericresearch.livejournal.com/626.html

This journal was set up by people claiming to be university students doing a class project.

They provide no information about themselves, their course, their university, or any human subjects review process.

They claim their anonymity is to allow unbiased responses.

As a faculty member who is part of an IRB committee at my university, I know that *anyone* including students who engages in academic research involving human subjects is required to go through an IRB review. There is a pedagogical exemption for faculty who are teaching their students methodology through specific assignments which result in materials that are not published or seen outside the course. So students might design a survey, get feedback on it, and then perhaps give it to their class, etc.

This project does not strike me as one that would fit the situation, but I do not know since they give no information. They are also not providing for anonymous data collection, and they are asking for specific information without information on how the data will be handled.

The lack of specific information makes me disinclined to accept without question the claim that their work is only for a course.

They provide no informed consent information.

They do not specify legal adults only (and given that they are focusing on Supernatural fandom and Wincest, that exclusion of minors is problematic).

I would strongly suggest not taking this survey; if you do take it, I would suggest being careful about what information you provide.

ETA: genericresearch is shutting down:

We have spoken to our advisors and done the research many of you have suggested. Before receiving many of these comments, we were quite unaware of all the issues that go into surveys like these, figuring something like this would be little more than an 'amped-up' Livejournal poll. We sincerely apologize for causing anyone any trouble and will not bother anyone again until we figure out our clearance.

Though it obviously brings us no absolution, we wanted to let you all know that we really are not a malicious group, and the only reason for our continued anonymity (other than our desire for impartiality of results) was fear of what can happen when you give out your information on the Internet.

We apoloogize again, and we hope you believe us when we say it. We really didn't know.

Note: This whole post will be removed in a day or two, probably along with this journal. The original survey found here will be replaced with this same message and also eventually removed.

More information about the conference can be found at: http://www.iafa.org

My proposal which I just send off (deadline is October 31, go me!) is behind the cut!

( The Rhetorics of Color-Blind Racism in Racefail 09 )

The Fantastic Wiki

The link leads to the first wiki I'm developing for my classes (I am NOT doing a wiki for every class; this wiki, The Fantastic Wiki, is for any class/assignment I have that involves any work in any genre or medium that fits the loosest possible definition of the "fantastic. Colleagues who want their students to have a wiki experience can also work with me, without having to set up their own wikis).

It's hosted at my university, and I'm learning as I go, and we're in REALLY early stages.

My course on astronomically themed sf starts on Monday (well, it's an online course, but the term starts Monday).

I've been playing around on my own for a while, but finally ordered Wikis for Dummies (ditto HTML)!

And I think I'm starting to grasp some of the principles underlying it all...*splashes around merrily*...

Thanks to Shannon's fantastic class I now have the tools to understand just how beautifully constructed/written (in all meanings of the word) this vid is: it's an introduction to the Converging Literacies Center which she has created, along with Donna Dunbar-Odom. I was sort of in the background cheering them on and talking about fan literacies and media literacies and convergence culture.

Take a look!

My blog entry on my final project can be found here.

All of my vids for the semester can be found at my account on imeem.org I chose imeem rather than Youtube because fan vidders I know post over there.

My final drafts (I am not sure whether I have one project or two: I keep going back and forth on that, but it's time to hand things in, so for now, they're final):


Only One Window -


Windows Final Draft -

Must be faculty, with experience advising dissertations!

Feel free to circulate to anyone else you think might be interested!

Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)

Request for Faculty Field-Building and Student-Training Proposals

The Social Science Research Council seeks proposals from pairs of tenured faculty in graduate training programs of US universities to design and lead dissertation proposal workshops for graduate students within emerging or revitalizing interdisciplinary fields of the humanities and/or social sciences. Selected field directors will lead groups of 12 graduate students in two workshops to orient the students to the field, prepare them for summer predissertation research, and enable them to prepare dissertation research and funding proposals. Applicant field directors must have experience supervising dissertation research, be trained in different disciplines, and based at different universities.

Each field director will receive a stipend of $10,000. The SSRC will recruit students competitively and provide organizational logistics for the workshops and student research.

Proposals should describe the nature and significance of the proposed field, the disciplines from which the SSRC might recruit students, and the training activities that would be offered. Applicants should also submit a short field bibliography and Curricula Vitae.

Applications must be submitted via the online application portal by October 2, 2009.

More information about the program may be found at: http://program.ssrc.org/dpdf. Please direct any questions to program staff at dpdf@ssrc.org.

The DPDF Program is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Our mailing address is:
dpdf@ssrc.org
Social Science Research Council <http://www.ssrc.org>

Social Science Research Council
One Pierrepont Plaza, 15th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11201

I'm leaving for the Kalamazoo conference today, so will not be able to be in class for the dry run. (I'm not a medievalist, but they let us do Tolkien!).

Here's my submission for a trailer:

Girls Having Fun: Creating a Fan Vid Potential trailer for class

First draft, second half, Only One WIndow (still rough--it needs work on pacing, beat/image correlation), but I'm experimenting with some images w/out music and music w/out images, and with a picasa "movie" imported into MWMM

first draft second half only one window -

And, liking what JP was doing I've been working on a Blog for my project: the rough draft is up and can be seen there (where it will be on top a while, instead of scrolling away in LJ format):
http://tamariskandterebinth.blogspot.com/

Viacom tries to suppress protests (over the whitewashed casting of a live action film based on an animated series) by claiming it "owns" the names and images: The OTW response.

ETA: Pushback Worked!. Apparently Zazzle blames Viacom, and Viacom blames Zazzle, but the artist's work is back on the site!

Girls Having Fun: Creating a Fan Vid Potential trailer for class

First draft, second half, Only One WIndow (still rough--it needs work on pacing, beat/image correlation), but I'm experimenting with some images w/out music and music w/out images, and with a picasa "movie" imported into MWMM


first draft second half only one window -

A panel of five publishers discussing publishing was reported on by LA Times.

The times they are a changing!

LJ is for process!

I will be posting the final product over here:

http://tamariskandterebinth.blogspot.com/

Special issue: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom (Summer 2011)

Transformative Works and Cultures

editor AT transformativeworks.org

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS

Sarah Gatson, Sociology, Texas A&M University Gatson AT tamu


Robin Reid, Literature and Languages, Texas A&M University–Commerce Robin_Reid AT tamu-commerce.edu

DESCRIPTION

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011.

Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.

In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.

Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.

Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially recuperative race readings (e.g., Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea).

Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb_Noire, and other panfannish and professional projects).

Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork, etc.).

SUBMISSIONS

Submit final papers directly to TWC by October 1, 2010. Please visit TWC’s Web site for complete submission guidelines. Please contact the guest editors with questions or inquiries.

ARTICLE TYPES

Theory: Apply a conceptual focus or theoretical frame. Peer review.5,000–8,000 words.

Praxis: Apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks. Peer review. 4,000–7,000 words.

Symposium: Provide insight into developments or debates surrounding fandom, transformative media, or cultures. Editorial review. 1,500–2,500 words.

Warner music claims Lessig is a pirate, has his presentation taken off YouTube

Article linked to is by Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing that starts by quoting a Twitter from Lawrence Lessig: "Warner Music has issued a takedown of one of my presos on YouTube. Someone send them a copy of 107 ("fair use")."

Link to Lessig's Twitter aaccount

Girls Having Fun: Creating My First Fan Vid

My final project this term will be in the form of an extensive blog entry that makes use of my earlier posts in LiveJournal as well as material created especially for the blog. I have chosen to use my blog created for my poetry class because LJ has character limits (one of its few flaws!) that the blog program does not. My blog post will be titled: Girls Having Fun in honor of the Cyndi Lauper song which was my first inspiration (but which doesn't seem to be making its way into the final draft). The post will include:

The final draft of the vid

Why I selected "fan vid" as my project for this course

Background information on the genre of fan vids

Background information on fandom

Background on the source texts and characters I use in my vid

Drafts of my work at different stages, with information on my process of revising

Plans for using writing with new media assignments in the sf core cluster and graduate course next year (where the assignment will be, basically, present an interpretation/re-mediation of an astronomically themed sf text in a new media form).

Henry Jenkins on the Susan Boyle phenomenon and "Spreadability."

Not aware of Susan Boyle?

Not allowing embedding any more: here's the clip from Britain's Got Talent.

Cry me a River, audio only, from 1999 charity performance, from Scottish Daily Record Newspaper

Revised vid: I used picasa to edit my images, and make collages, and I spent a whole lot of time trying to synch the images to the beat of the music (fingers are sore from pounding on desk!). The more I listened to the music file and watched the audio patterns in moviemaker, the more I saw that 2.80 seemed to be a significant interval in the song--so a lot of the images are timed to that, or very close, which makes the pace faster. I'll be interested in what people say: and very happy for concrit since I want to get better at this!


Only One Window -

Picasa is totally cool! I downloaded the other day, played around a bit, and here is my second attempt at a collage, using pictures taken on a trip to England (Tolkien 2005). These are all from Oxford, and include pictures of the doors of the places J. R. R. Tolkien lived (door imagery is huge in Tolkien's work), as well as pictures of Oxford buildings and parks and his and his wife's gravestone. I edited the pictures (SO EASY), put into a separate album, picked the 'collage' option and edited the placement, orientation, and size of the images. DED EAZY!

( big pic behind cut )