otw_news | FAQ series: first set

FAQ series: first set

Last week,

There has been a great deal of discussion during and after our "Why OTW?" week, not only about OTW, but also about what it is to identify as a fan, what fandom means to different people and how individual fans and groups shape their own fannish experiences.

It's evident from what we've read that there have been some misconceptions about what our org is and what we hope to do. We apologise if we have been unclear about some of the concepts and policies, and we hope you will understand that we are still in the process of setting up policies and honing language. We don't have all the final, polished answers yet and we need time, hard work and your help to do that. In fact, our content policy will be up for discussion and feedback in a fandom-wide setting before we set our policies in stone.

In the hopes of not overwhelming you, we've decided to post the FAQ in bundles of five or six questions and answers, one bundle every other day or so. Ultimately, they'll all be added to the OTW website's FAQ.

What you'll read here in

otw_news is a bit more informal than what will appear on the website; that's because the website is for fans and non-fans alike. But here, in

otw_news, we're fans talking to fans. SRSLY.

Keep a look out for more bundles of FAQs as well as interviews with a few of the OTW's board members in the next few weeks!

1. Fandom got along just fine without OTW for forty years.

This is true and we hope will continue to be true for another 40 and 400 years--fandom will definitely continue to do fine without us and after us and forever and ever amen. But, on the other hand, fandom has not had the internet for 40 years. With the advent of the internet, and especially Web 2.0, fandom's connection with the so-called Real World has increased, and its relationship with copyright holders has increasingly come under focus. OTW is attempting to add a voice to the conversation about copyright, one that is articulate, informed, organized, and on the side of fandom.

2. Why do you care about Fanlib? Fanlib isn't forcing anyone to archive there, just ignore them!

FanLib set a dangerous precedent that fandom is available for the profitable plucking and exploitation by people who are not part of the culture of fandom; OTW does not, never has, and never will, profit from fandom, and objects on principle to FanLib's attempt to do so.

OTW's concern is that for-profit companies like Fanlib might become the public face of fanfiction, especially since fanfiction writers have a history of lying low. With more companies than ever keenly interested in how they can profit from "user-generated content", OTW doesn't want fannish newbies and other interested parties thinking this for-profit ideology represents fandom or for fans to be taken advantage of by such companies.

3. OTW's corporate structure is suspect. Fandom should be subversive.

OTW believes that its mission is best served by an organization that is transparent and accountable.

4. Why does OTW want to make fanworks legitimate? We don't need society's legitimization!

The kind of legitimization the OTW is focused on is that of fans being able to post their stories and art and vids without worrying they will be hit with a lawsuit. That's all. Sadly, we're pretty sure society as a whole will never quite understand the \o/ of something like, say, a really good wingfic. Which is a shame.

5. Edited at 9:59 a.m. 2/1/08 to remove this question. The specific concerns will be addressed in later FAQs. Our sincere apologies for this misstep; no dismissiveness of the concerns raised within it was intended in any form. We very much appreciate the discussion regarding the way it was perceived.

Edited at 9:50 p.m. 2/1/08. When we realized that our flip answer to question 5 was inappropriate for this forum, we deleted it. However, for archival purposes and in the hope of achieving some measure of transparency, here it is again:

5. The OTW is trying to take over all of fandom, and they didn't talk to me first, and they started in LJ, and they're going to cause all of fandom to be destroyed, and the worst of all is that they're a bunch of academics! They're trying to reinvent fandom when we have all the archives we already need thank you very much, and we don't need another one, and they're going to (1) legitimitise or (2) commercialize fandom and ruin it for all by dragging some terribly bad case of fanfiction into court. They use big words, and they're taking too long to set things up and they're not answering emails fast enough. (A tongue-in-cheek crticism from ithiliana's post: http://ithiliana.livejournal.com/804036.html)

Yes, there are some academics involved with the org. There are also some students, some lawyers, some unemployed folks, some young people, some old people, some fannish newbies, some folks who've been in fandom for decades, some blondes, some brunettes, and some redheads. :-)

And we're really not trying to reinvent fandom. We're building a fabulous, scaleable pan-fandom archive chock-full of interesting features which we hope fans will choose to use, but even if you'd rather not use it, you can still take advantage of the archive code and use it to build something else.

Commercializing fandom is exactly what we don't plan to do. We're here to try to prevent that from happening. Folks like FanLib and even copyright holders and user-generated content sites that make money from ad-revenues want to commercialize and monetize fandom, to make money off of the things we produce out of sheer love; we're here to offer an alternative to for-profit fansites, with the intent of preserving and protecting the fannish world we know and love.

--

femmequixotic,

bethbethbeth,

ciderpress,

mirabile_dictu,

shrift,

svmadelyn.
Community Relations Committee

Edited 7:39 p.m. 1/31/08 to remove phrase regarding hair colors per comments below.
Edited at 9:59 a.m. 2/1/08 to remove question 5 per comments below.
Edited at 9:50 p.m. 2/1/08 to re-add question 5, struckthrough, for archival and transparency purposes.

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Wonderful post!

and for aca-fans broadens out to how they represent fandom material to non-fandom viewers (and on the flip side, how they gained permission from their fandom sources). The "netiquette" of quotation, linking, remixing, commenting, etc., are all related strongly to both the ways that fandom gets its own original material (poaching?) and how it wants aca-fans or pro-fans to treat fandom (not poaching!).

I have noticed that this is a fandom-specific concern. I have seen published studies where the writer did not obtain permission to quote from blogs, stories, or open posts. In my little fandom corner of the world, this is considered impolite, even unethical. And yet it's absolutely reasonable to many, who consider an open post...well...open. This kind of thing lacks consensus within the fan community, and the strategies you list may not be consistently meaningful.

My personal take on academics writing in fandom, be they acafans or just academics who happened to stumble across something fannish and interesting and engaged as an outsider (like an interesting study I read about Television Without Pity by a nonfan), is that all academic work, of every kind, is a kind of nonfiction fanfic, and fanfic itself is a kind fictive criticism. Don't all these forms of creation require basically the same strategies? Deep understanding of the source text; engagement with a community with certain standards that surrounds the text and provides a framework whereby it is judged; remix for effect or parody; application of an outside theory on an artwork (deconstruction! stream of consciousness! pointillism!).

Academics are intensely, fannishly interested in a particular subject, and they engage according to a set of rules governed by a community, which rewards them if they do well with things like tenure. Fans are intensely, academically interested in a particular subject, and they engage according to a set of rules governed by a community, which rewards them if they do well with things like feedback or status. It's true that if you get tenure, you presumably get money to go along with the job that they now can't arbitrarily fire you from, whereas with fanfic, you get adulation and little else, which brings us to...

There's more than money involved. Distrust of aca-fans is similar to discourse about BNFs. At issue, then, is voluntarism vs. reward, anonymity vs. recognition.

I'm unaffiliated, but I do see some troubling trends that may limit the ability of acafans to continue their work. One big one is ethnographic research, which is increasingly becoming limited to publication from people or groups who have been certified by an institutional review board to do work with human subjects, even if that means that you just administered a questionnaire online. Ticky boxes = human subjects! And it's also true that academics who work with things considered weird by nonfans, such as, oh, let's say SLASH, may not do work in that field, because it would do to have their RL name linked with such a topic.

So even within the academic world, "voluntarism vs. reward, anonymity vs. recognition" is fraught. It's just not that simple. You probably can't get a job or tenure if you're doing nothing but fan studies, but you can if you leaven it with something respectable, like media or film studies, or audience analysis. And sometimes you can't publish on what you're interested in because you don't want to out yourself or force your school to fire you because you are interested in Harry Potter slash and they're all underage ohno!

I agree that all these topics need to be discussed; and I really didn't know, one way or the other, what fen think of acafans, mostly because I know quite a few acafans and they seem pretty much like fen to me. It seems odd to be so mistrustful of people who have so very, very much to lose, merely by dint of having a RL name attached.

I have noticed that this is a fandom-specific concern. I have seen published studies where the writer did not obtain permission to quote from blogs, stories, or open posts

I was told recently (by someone I'd never spoken to before) that lurkers culd quote just fine w/out permission, but since I am in fandom, I have to meet a higher standard; while I agree, in principle, with that (i.e. as a member of the community, I have a higher responsibility to the community than someone outside), I was then told that I should realize that my even asking for permission to talk about a story was an incredibly hostile "academizing" act that was probably traumatic to the person (turned out not to be true, when I finally managed to connect to the person who'd been busy in RL and not checking email). But at that point, I disengaged because I figured no matter what I did, I was damned (and that person is also an academic).

So there is NO agreement on any of these issues.

The IRB issue is more complex than you present it here: a *lot* depends on the makeup of the specific IRB and the specific campus. I hope more and more the Boards realize that different disciplinary standards apply, and that one cannot apply a cookie-cutter approach. Outside of working with certain populations (prisoners, pregnant women, minors) as the "study group," and outside of certain types of studies (clearly medical and psychological are the most relevant), the submission to IRB is not that onerous (everywhere). My own campus IRB is very good at being aware of diffrent standars for, say, oral history and journalistic types of research, and while I have some some questionnaires, that research never came until full IRB review.

Of course, academic committees are academic committees, and there can be power mad idiots anywhere (even in fandom). The old IRB chair here did not used to allow ANY ethnographic research at all, only quantitative, even in social sciences. People cheered when he left campus.

It seems odd to be so mistrustful of people who have so very, very much to lose, merely by dint of having a RL name attached.

Academics as a class/group do have a lot of social status and privilege, and I understand it's hard to people outside that culture to see the hierarchies within. But you're right here--and it's unfortunate that at least one critic of OTW is determined on linking one of the OTW members to her real life academic persona, something I'd always thought was frowned upon in this wonderful fandom culture we are all a part of (except for us academics, apparently).

A wonderful post--you know a lot about academia without being heavily invested in the scholarship/publish or perish parts of it all.

My own campus IRB is very good at being aware of diffrent standars for, say, oral history and journalistic types of research, and while I have some some questionnaires, that research never came until full IRB review.

Sure, I get that the research will often be rubber-stamped, or they'll look at your project and say, "We don't need to approve this. Go forth!" Like, you usually don't need IRB approval for a retrospective analysis of a published data set.

But in the back of my head when I was writing all this was the sad fact that I'm unaffiliated, and if I want to do human-studies research, I probably would never be able to get it published, because...I'm unaffiliated, and no IRB approval will be forthcoming. So nobody will publish my research.

I perceive this as a huge, huge problem. If research becomes so academic-ized that people cannot participate, it's a sad day for research. I get how in the sciences this is far more of an issue—people working out of homemade labs in their garages are unlikely to have the infrastructure and equipment to get that vaccine to human trials! And vaccines to human trials are just the things that IRBs were invented to oversee, not fans creating ticky-box questionnaires on LJ, you know?

So my concern is really more that the academy is insinuating itself everywhere and insisting on a level of oversight that is in fact inappropriate, mostly to cover their asses, but this is resulting in a quashing of valid, relevant research.

This is all so beautifully said. *blinks fast*

Really. I particularly happy-smiled at this:

"Academics are intensely, fannishly interested in a particular subject... Fans are intensely, academically interested in a particular subject...."

Haha, the all-purpose defense for both my geekly lifestyles at once!

Although the ring of the second phrase is a bit more jangly than the first, and I fear that's because while it simply sounds *intense* for academics to be "intensely, fannishly interested" in their pursuit, for fans or anyone to be "intensely, academically interested" sounds a bit of a contradiction in terms. "Academic" is too often used to mean a person is distanced, even indifferent. *mourns* Fans are, of course, by definition anything but!

I wish all academics *were* "fannish" in their intensity of interest.

On your other point, the rules and constraints troubling acafan work (and all academic work in general; I've been helping interview for a VP of Research and ooh-la-la, the regulatory compliance is hated by all, ag research as much as anthropology)... I hope to see, under OTW's aegis or not, some work within fandom on developing sensitive but workable rule sets that apply to the varied contexts and communities, such that rules can be proposed by researchers and the community to reviewers, rather than having rules imposed on them by IRBs.

The best check of ethical treatment in research is review by the community it concerns. Third=party assessment against generic rules in a handbook is a proxy substitute, which ignores the real community, its context, and particular concerns. There have been so many changes in this area... I've been reading the latest stories about repatriation of classical artworks; I'm sure there are more changes to come. "Participatory" ethnography exists; there might need to be more participatory fandom scholarship done, too. It's a shift, but of course you and Kristina show that the results can be very satisfactory for research and the community.

I wish all academics *were* "fannish" in their intensity of interest.

The thing is, I think they are, but the notion of a veneer of disinterest over the top of it is still perceived as being present. In the humanities, we are in the middle of the task of stripping away that veneer. In fan studies, strangely, explaining your engagement is a must; hardly any essay begins without a paragraph or two of subject positioning. Sometimes it's relevant; sometimes (as in a close reading of a single text) it's not. One fun thing that Kristina and I did in our book was tell writers to not worry about it. We covered the subject positioning in the intro, so the writers could save words for actual relevant content.

I had this in the back of my head when I wrote the response to you. You can tell from the title why I was thinking of it:

Jenson, Joli. 1992. Fandom as pathology: The consequence of characterization. In The adoring audience, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 9–29. London: Routledge.

I hope to see, under OTW's aegis or not, some work within fandom on developing sensitive but workable rule sets that apply to the varied contexts and communities, such that rules can be proposed by researchers and the community to reviewers, rather than having rules imposed on them by IRBs.

I agree. I also think that in this matter, OTW and TWC may have different standards, because of the different nature of the projects and certain concerns about outside (grant) funding. I doubt OTW would find itself confronted with IRB concerns, but really, you never know.

TWC (the journal) has decided that, for research purposes, we'll follow the tenets of online research laid out in the Association of Internet Research's Guide on Ethical Online Research (http://www.aoir.org/?q=node/30). This is an outside body concerned with online research, and they totally focus on this topic and do it better than we ever could. We support their mission. Check them out and let me know what you think.

It's true that Kristina and I are both from a particular fannish background, and some of our editorial team are from another, but we'll be receiving essays from, we hope, a broad spectrum, and there will be little "community" consensus about acceptability of research methods.

We therefore need to be as broad and open as possible, which means that the policy we have on, for example, quotation of online sources, is not restrictive:

TWC, like its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), is committed to the free expression of ideas, particularly in the context of scholarly activity about derivative fan artworks. Therefore, we do not require the consent, explicit or implicit, of the original author of a transformative work under discussion, such as a piece of fan fiction or a vid. All citation URLs to such texts need only be open to the public. (TWC's submission guidelines (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions))

So the fannish part of me that firmly feels it's wrong to not obtain permission for that fanfic you're analyzing has to get over it; if it's an open post, it's fair game. Were I to write an essay for TWC, I would personally obtain permission because that's part of my community standards. But as an editor, I must accept the research methods selected by the researcher and trust that she is working within her own community's standards.

..."the notion of a veneer of disinterest over the top of it is still perceived as being present. In the humanities, we are in the middle of the task of stripping away that veneer."

Ah, if only this obtained across *all* the disciplines I work in! Next week I'll be at the Pop Culture/Amer.Culture conference (SW/TX regional) and I know that my utter enthusiasm for my subject, my first-person engagement with the material and the students I care about (presenting on an "environmental worldviews in music" teaching approach - mediated philosophy, lol) will be welcome. In fact, its absence might seem odd.

But most of my work is reviewed by your classic stodgy-male (and male-like female, ack) faculty who have a knee-jerk habit of expecting elaborate statistical measures of "objectivity" and rejecting enthusiastic work - or reception - as "popular". LOL. Freudian case study, that. I have more than one faculty who quite srsly believes "analysis" = "quantitative measures," preferably in a chemistry lab. I love that humanities has started to melt the ice of the obsessive emulation of "Science." However, even where humanities are represented on committees at my university (rarely, alas) or acknowledged in many my professional societies, it's as the lesser Other approach, the shabby relative of Real (heavily funded) Science.

But hey, the hell with them :-) Times, and the ethos, are changing. TWC's startup offers all the concrete "proof" one could demand.

I have Lewis on my shelf, but largely unread, like most of my media and fandom items. I'll eagerly check out the research ethics link - Thanks!

I appreciate your careful and explicit stance wrt OTW's, TWC's, and your own personal framings of fanwork research ethics. Simply seeing that the nuances and inevitable dilemmas are acknowledged may often be (and at least in my anthropology experience, has been) good enough warrant for a community to extend their trust.

Thanks for all your thoughtful replies, and sharing these observations! I very much look forward to seeing TWC's work.

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FAQ series: first set

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