Journal Committee Announced

[femmequixotic]

We'd like to announce our new Journal Committee, whose function is the launching of an international, blind peer-reviewed journal published online twice a year by the OTW. The journal will be committed to publishing high-quality academic research as a way to document and analyze fan histories, cultures, and artifacts. Its first issue is slated for publication in September 2008.

Journal Committee:
Chair: Karen Hellekson
Kristina Busse
Cynthia W. Walker
Deborah Kaplan
Alexis Lothian
Cole J. Banning
Julie Levin Russo

The journal has been named Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC). The committee is in the process of appointing scholars to the journal's advisory and review boards. They plan to have a call for papers by February 2008.

Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at MIT, author of such works as Textual Poachers; Fans, Gamers and Bloggers; and Convergence Culture and member of TWC’s advisory board, says:

The field of Fan Studies has come of age: there are dozens of gifted young scholars from a range of different disciplines doing groundbreaking work in the field at the moment, each bringing their own distinctive theoretical and methodological perspectives to the topic, each connecting the study of fans to larger debates surrounding media and society. The time is ripe for a journal which will bring all of these researchers together and provide them with an intellectual home. And ideally that journal will come bottom up—from the community of fans and fan scholars. Given this context, Transformative Works and Cultures is a dream come true—an exciting chance to consolidate this field and at the same time, bridge the gap between fans and fan scholars.

TWC will publish articles about transformative works and related areas, including fan fiction, fan vids, fan communities, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and machinima. The journal invites a variety of critical approaches and encourages authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hyperlinked articles, or other forms that test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC’s aim is twofold: to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community, and to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics.

TWC plans a mix of traditional academic articles and shorter contributions in a Symposium section. We hope to solicit contributions from leading figures in the field, emerging scholars from a variety of disciplines, and theoretical-minded fans. Like OTW, TWC has an expanded notion of fair use. The publication permits the duplication of stills, and the journal will include the ability to embed video clips. TWC will be copyrighted under a Creative Commons license.

ETA: From the Journal Committee... The journal accepts four types of contributions: theory, practice, Symposium, and reviews. Theory is comprised of full-length research essays that are 6,000–9,000 words long. Essays in this section propose novel ideas that are placed within a coherent theoretical framework and add something new to the field.

Practice is comprised of 3,000–6,000 words long essays that apply a specific theory to a community; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate practice to theory within a theoretical framework. Theory and Practice essays are blind peer-reviewed by up to three reviewers, who are scholars in media studies, fan studies, English, communication, and related fields.

Symposium is named in homage to the fan-based collection of meta essays and in its spirit collects collects short, thematically contained essays. These 1,500-word essays provide insight into current events on any topic.

Reviews are of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies and include a description of the item's content, an evaluation of its importance in a larger context, and an assessment of the likely audience. Symposium essays and reviews will be editorially reviewed.

---femmequixotic, bethbethbeth, ciderpress, mirabile_dictu, shrift, svmadelyn
Community Relations Committee

Comments

[loligo.livejournal.com]

The committee is currently soliciting members for the journal's advisory and review boards.

To whom can we direct our offers to serve on the board? I don't see contact info for this one on the original list of committees.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

Can't wait to read the first issue!

[cleo]

As with loligo's request, I would like to know as well. Thanks.

[hope]

Awesome! I have forwarded the link to this entry to a few of my academic peers, with instructions to pass it on to anyone else they think might be interested :)

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Thirding the above requests for contact information. I would very much like to participate.

[hector-rashbaum.livejournal.com]

I've got a quick question, only marginally related to the post:

In the Clarification and Answers (http://community.livejournal.com/otw_news/10668.html#cutid1) post from last month, you stated you'd been paying attention to the discussions about the perceived exclusions in your terminology, and were considering revisions to the mission statement (although, the mission statement wasn't the only place problematic language was used, but *stops self from digressing*).

Since then we haven't heard anything about the issue, and the language those of us who spoke up considered problematic is still being used. So I'm just curious as to the status of the issue - is it being discussed, is the discussion over and you just haven't updated us, was there never much discussion in the first place, etc.

In that Clarification post, you did defend your use of "transformative works" and "media fandom" - however I'm unclear as to whether that was meant as a "we're not changing this at all because..." or "this is where we're coming from". And if the former is the case, then my question really is, what revisions were you considering at all, since those were the terms that were causing problems?

If you are still discussion the terminology issue, I find the use of the phrases we argued against troubling, as it opens the door for someone to say "well, you raise good points, but we've already been using them so much it'd be silly to change."

Heh, I went a little tl;dr. So, in short: Are you still "considering revisions" as you stated in the Clarification post? If so, why the continued usage of the problematic terminology, and if not, why?

[femmequixotic]

There will be a post coming soon regarding the mission statement; there have been changes made to it, and as soon as we're able, we'll be sharing it here with the community at large.

[femmequixotic]

You can reach them to share your interest in participating at editor@transformativeworks.org! (Apologies for the earlier deleted comment; I was just corrected on it. *G*)

[kbusse.livejournal.com]

Loligo,

TWC will be a traditional academic peer-reviewed journal and, as such, the review boards are selected from academic and independent scholars who have published in the respective fields. If you are an acafan who publishes on fan studies and fan cultures, please feel free to contact the journal with your cv. We can be reached at editor at transformativeworks dot org.

I am terribly sorry for the misunderstanding, and the post will be changed to clarify this.

[femmequixotic]

You can contact the journal team at editor@transformativeworks.org. :)

[femmequixotic]

The journal committee can be reached at editor@transformativeworks.org!

[fuschia.livejournal.com]

This is great news. Congratulations!

[the-shoshanna.livejournal.com]

Cool!

[i-the-eo.livejournal.com]

This is so exciting. *I* am so excited. What a fantastic opportunity for fen, in so many fashions.

[jmtorres.livejournal.com]

*single perfect tear of joy*

I wish this journal had existed 5 years ago when I was trying to research papers!

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

Great news, and a stellar committee!

Building on fandebate, I'd love to have a forum for discussion of the articles as the journal takes shape. I've seen some journals whose online sites incorporate "eLetters" for reader responses, but an LJ comm (or the like) could facilitate much richer and broader dialogues.

[kbusse.livejournal.com]

Karen would be able to answer that better, but afaik, the journaling software actually allows for blog-like interaction. We hadn't thought of a separate LJ comm, but that could be really interesting. Thanks for the great suggestion!

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

I have seen a "post comment" option for one open access journal publisher (BioMed Central), but I've gotten addicted to the threaded comments -- and icons ;) -- on LJ. Of course, anybody could start an LJ comm -- I'm not trying to saddle you with another item on what's already surely a hefty to-do list!

[kbusse.livejournal.com]

No, it's a great idea. I'm wondering how successful it would be, because I know that the Symposium's LJ comm rarely generated much debate, so it might be easier to comment physically closer to the actual essay.

Otoh, like you, I vastly prefer threaded comments, plus, if the different interactions at Henry's blog and fandebate showed us anything it is how the context and interface affects conversation. (Flow's response feature, for example, is not used all that much, I think.)

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

There are other sites with threaded commenting, though -- Slashdot comes to mind. And isn't that part of old open-source LJ code anyway? You might be able to do a quick-and-dirty cut-and-paste job into TW&C's site. I agree with you that it's easier to comment on-site, rather than keeping a tab open for LJ elsewhere.

Also, I'm incredibly tempted to submit one of my term papers, but it would be totally obvious who it was from and would thus eliminate the "blindness" factor, I think. On the other hand I loved what Henry had to say -- you're all right, the time is now, we have to make a go of it, so I might as well submit when it's ready. Provided you get that review board up, of course. :)

One more thing: if you're committed to fair use, does that mean I could Creative Commons-license my article and publish it elsewhere, if I was lucky enough to get it through your review board?

[kbusse.livejournal.com]

Fandrogyny,

why would it be obvious? Of course, if a peer reviewer were dedicated enough, they could google the title or ideas and possibly find the author like that, but I'm not sure most reviewers would go to that trouble :)

I'll let someone else take the CC question, but I'm pretty certain that most journals (including us) demand original material, so even if our license allowed you to do with your article as you please, I doubt you'd be able to publish it elsewhere.

[slashpine.livejournal.com]

Second the threaded comments. And icons! (or even macros *cough*)

It would be great to be able to thread in the journal's site, as well as having typical "letters" type comments that allowed responses to be associated.

I find the open-source LJ format so much more congenial and productive - and like fandebate wrap-up comments have noted, so noticeably different - I'd be reluctant to sacrifice such lively and welcoming commenting capacity to a desire to have the journal "stand-alone." Because ... er, it might do that then. Or at least, it would not invite fans in the most immediately friendly way: by using the same software they use, by existing where they exist, by being part of their world, instead of appearing to stand apart from it.

Regarding the anticipated call for papers - it will, I hope, have good academic cred as well as being accessible to all levels of readers, such that it can be submitted to lots of list-serves, and posted in our departments as well. To that end, some thumbnail bios of the board, OTW, etc., might be a strong feature of the CFP along with the usual list of topic types, 'fine print,' etc.

I will certainly look forward to sharing it at the two universities where I am! Congratulations on this crossing of another frontier!

academia + fandom! It's like : crack + crack

[the-emef.livejournal.com]

holy cow

I think I just came in my pants

[anoel.livejournal.com]

Yay! This is so incredibly awesome. It's good to have our own journal :) There's so many fabulously smart, well-written acafans in fandom that deserve to have that recognition.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

that's fucking awesome!