Here's a roundup of stories about fandom under pressure that might be of interest to fans:

• In some of the latest takedown actions from the past month a fan offering free high-resolution downloads of his artwork for video game Fallout was contacted by a law firm representing the game owner Bethesda, issuing a cease and desist for his website. The artist replied in detail to the charges and has so far refused to turn his domain name over to the company, although he did remove links to the posters.


• Popular website TV Tropes removed fanfiction recommendations on their site after encountering problems with Google's Ad Sense which required them to remove "mature and adult content" from the site. Aside from the issue of advertiser control of content, however, others were upset about what it meant for their use of the site. As one poster commented "The problem, as I see it, is that the admins have destroyed countless hours of our work. I don't demand that pages be restored onto this particular server, but I do demand that the source material (pages as they existed pre-cut) be made available in some fashion, so that those who want can host it elsewhere."


• In many places, online access to content isn't affected by advertisers or corporate owners, but by governments. For example, Vietnamese authorities have recently mandated that Internet companies assist in online censorship. Among the provisions of a proposed decree, "Internet users 'are strictly prohibited' from providing fictitious personal data" which will prohibit all forms of anonymous blogging and discussion. Personal blogs will have to publicize the name and contact information of the individual responsible and will be held personally liable for all the published content on their blogs.


• On the other hand at least one sports blogger is alarmed at the possibility that team owners might put important decisions in fans' hands. "As counter-intuitive as it sounds, as much as the Sixers should care about making the fans happy, they shouldn't care about what those fans want on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of a devastating losing streak. When they ask what the fans think about their roster, it isn't hip, catchy, or new-media savvy. It's insulting." Instead the blogger suggests, "continue to ask us what we think of a new lighting scheme, insist on our thoughts about a moose for a mascot, and call our home phones to ask how to make better use of '1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Sixers.' Those are the some of the best elements of a new fan-owner partnership."

If you have news of legal actions against fans or content takedowns, why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW. Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Welcome to our first Survey Sunday, where you will find a list of all questions asked in the OTW Community Survey. We introduced the idea in our previous post: we cannot release raw survey data to the public, but still want to give you the opportunity to interrogate that data. So from now through December, you can ask us questions relating to survey, and we'll try and dig up the answers.

The idea behind of posting this overview of all questions is that it enables you to ask combinations. A very conservative example: by cross-referencing questions #35 and #36 you get "Do people without prior wiki experience have trouble creating Fanlore articles?"

However, before you dig into the questions, please read our fine print so you know what to expect in terms of results:
( Read more... )

Here's a roundup of stories looking at transformative works that might be of interest to fans:

• In this Tumblr blog post, the issue of transformative works is addressed directly and as with many Tumblr posts, the image conveys the message. Here, the subject is Johannes Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring holding a camera as if to take a picture of her painter or the viewer. "[T]ransformative work, intratextual work, is most emphatically not a new thing, nor a creatively barren thing. It’s awesome. And this image here is delicious, because it takes that lovely painting, in which the model is mysterious, alluring, her parted lips gleaming and her eyes wide as she looks out at the viewer, objectified - and it drags it straight into the 21st century by adding the camera, making it into that recognisable MySpace pose, making her the CREATOR of the image not just the object. She is looking at herself, not at us, and this careful composition becomes an ephemeral snapshot, a fleeting moment in her day."


• University of Utah English professor Anne Jamison was profiled as a scholar of fan fiction after the course she taught on it became attached to discussions surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey. "Focusing her scholarly eye to the phenomenon was a departure from the norm for the 42-year-old professor, a native of Albany, N.Y. Yet fan fiction fed her longtime interests in female writers and genre fiction, and she’s in the process of compiling and editing articles for a scholarly anthology on the topic. 'I told everyone I knew that [fan fiction] is a global connective of housewives and professional women exchanging erotica and writing advice online,' she said. 'Everyone yawned. I thought it was very interesting.'"


• Other higher education coursework also addresses the existence of fanworks. In a recap of vidding that included citations from the OTW's Rebecca Tushnet, one student concluded "Despite the forces of money, law, technical challenges and the fans’ need to interact with the shows and characters that they love, vidding was born and continues to thrive. The fan communities and their pursuits are supported by the efforts of those, like Lessig and Tushnet, who fight for a better environment for remix culture. Over the months and years to come, I look forward to enjoying the stories and perspectives of fan culture in these kind of vids, and monitoring progress in the fight to allow them to do it."

If you make fan vids, write fan fiction or create fan art, why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW. Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Fanlore is appealing for help in an urgent effort to assist fans affected by the disappearance of free sites on FortuneCity, an early Internet website provider that hosted many personal fanfic websites and small archives due to its free accounts. In conjunction with the more clearly communicated Geocities fadeout a few years ago, this action on Fortunecity's part has meant the loss of another chunk of fannish history.

Fanlore is hosting the website addresses of the now deleted sites. Knowing the addresses to old sites gives fans searching for them a chance to recover and access the content once held there by going through the Wayback Machine.

A Google spreadsheet has been started so that volunteers can "claim a fandom, read the instructions...and pitch in."

Although an email was sent to account holders, many of the addresses tied to those accounts are no longer valid or are no longer frequently used by the maintainers. In addition many fans did not see an announcement banner because it was placed with the site ads, which many users have blocked while visiting the site.

The effort to document the URLs of the missing pages is urgent because they are currently stored by Google, but Google deletes its cached records in a short time if a webpage disappears or changes. This is why many typing fingers are needed, to record those addresses before they disappear from search results.

If you can help, please do the following:

1) Sign up on the Google spreadsheet for particular fandoms. Follow the instructions to record the addresses.
2) Contact Fanlore if you need help with the project, or want to submit addresses but do not have a Fanlore account (use Fanlore's contact page here: http://transformativeworks.org/contact/fanlore%20gardeners and put "FortuneCity help!" in the subject line)

If you are an author or artist whose work was deleted by FortuneCity, we would welcome it on the Archive of Our Own. If you need an invitation to upload your work there, contact AO3 Support via our support form and put "FortuneCity content" in the summary line.

Please do what you can to help rescue these lost works!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

To everyone following news on the OTW's Survey we conducted last month, we wanted to not only provide you with some more results, but also lay out our plan going forward in terms of

1) What we can release;
2) How quickly we can release it;
3) What sort of schedule you can expect.

( Read more... )

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Here's a roundup of stories about the importance of fandom that might be of interest to fans:

• Singer Alexandra Burke wrote about the importance of her fans, saying she can "fully appreciate the extent that 'fandom' as some people like to call it has really taken over. I am superclose to my fans (probably too close for it to be healthy lol) but I feel like they are this extended family of mine and they do so much for me, and there's no better form of honesty than if these guys don't like something/don't like some of my music - they won't dress it up in cotton wool - they will just tell you damn straight!" What's more, "[t]he last few years I think for me have certainly changed my perception on this whole 'movement', and no doubt that of label's and management who now have whole teams dedicated to ensuring that the fanbase is looked after."
  


• Dr. Who fans, on the other hand, got a whole book written on their importance. SFX reviewed The Official Doctor Who Fan Club: Volume One and concluded that "[e]ven readers born many years after 1971 will probably experience a stab of nostalgia. You are transported back to more innocent times: before forum flame wars; before fandom had been commodified. This was a time when you could write to the Doctor and know there was a decent chance of getting a letter back; a time when Who fans had to make their own entertainment (one of Keith’s innovations was a 'lending library' of hand-made, one-off novellas of old stories, available to borrow one at a time). You may find yourself wondering if we weren’t better off back then."
  


• If the discussion at Den of Geek is any indication, the above book will likely sell well. Contemplating what fandom did for Dr. Who, they note that "the market is completely different these days. Before the show came back, Doctor Who merchandise was a relatively small but lucrative area, mainly based round adult collectors. Now it's a huge and broad market, with magazines and toys selling large numbers in supermarkets to kids." They then attempt to quantify Who fandom, speculating "When you consider that Doctor Who Magazine's 2011 circulation was 30,682 these figures are impressive, but for further context we must ask: how many hard-core Doctor Who fans are there?...If you combine the highest figure from fan-sites' Twitter followers or forum members the total is roughly 145,700. This figure does show is that, even adjusting upwards (say, doubling the figure to accommodate variables), the kind of fan who is debating how much of Destiny of the Daleks was written by Terry Nation or Douglas Adams has gone from being the near-totality of fandom to being a minority (the average UK viewing figure for the 2011 series was 7.75 million)."
  


• Certainly the U.S.'s SyFy network has realized the importance of fannish content to its bottom line. Their recent upfront presentation included various shows targeted at fans. Aside from creating two different shows aimed at collectors, there is a new project on cosplayers, Divas of Dress Up, and the "Untitled Mark Burnett Project...where fans of science fiction/fantasy books and movies compete to create the most flavorful and inspired dishes from the foods featured in the imaginary worlds that they love."
  

If you are part of Dr. Who fandom or want to share your fandom recipes, why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Here's a roundup of stories about the changing nature of fandom that might be of interest to fans:

• Writing about the experience of moving from fan to pro, baseball blogger Joey Matschulat echoes the discussions of burnout that also recently made the rounds among television recappers, only this time discussing the revelations of fellow sports bloggers. "I still enjoy writing about this team...but my fandom won't have a snowball's chance in hell of being what it once was until the day I walk away from all of this, and it may never be the same. That's just the way it is...I welcome with open arms the next wave of young, talented, hungry writers that want to try and make a name for themselves in the ever-expanding world of online baseball scouting/sabermetric analysis...but if you're really going to commit for the long haul, be prepared to live with the unintended consequences of your decision."


• Some changes can be generational, as evidenced by the fact that kids can now go to writing camps that include fan fiction on the agenda. But changes in music fandom have been as much technological as they are due to cultural awareness. Nitsuh Abebe posted about how music fandom has gotten rewired in New York Magazine. "There are the rituals, for one thing. The youth of previous decades have fond memories of hand-labeling cassette mixes or scoping out the record shelves of party hosts; youth of today can eventually feel the same about, say, those ecstatic binges of discovery that keep you up all night listening to Korean pop. Physically handling your record collection is like wandering a neighborhood you know by heart, bumping into unexpected friends; diving into the massive catalogue of streaming music is more like being able to teleport to any city on the planet, an experience as daunting as it is freeing."


• More than one technology company has decided to target the fan market, but the real change is in how information flows through fan networks and changes the fannish experience. ESPN blogger and self-proclaimed "NBA junkie" Daniel Nowell tested the effects of social media on his game-watching by staying off Twitter for three weeks. "I’ve heard people talk about the power of Twitter as a community-builder, a way to sit and watch games with friends, but it had never occurred to me that Twitter was making the product of the games themselves more enjoyable. In fact, I’d come to think of tweeting during games as a distraction, and on the nights when I needed to do it for an assignment I treated it warily. But once I was off Twitter, I realized that what it allows members to do is experience the game all day long."


• Tallulah Habib of South Africa's IT Web wrote about what she called "the fandom disconnect" between businesses that find fans the most potent of their marketers, and the entertainment industry, which doles out mixed messages to its audience. "Take, for instance, the approach of copyright holders on YouTube. By all means, they should ask the video site to take down content that is dumped straight 'as-is' onto the free channel. That's piracy, plain and simple. But what of the fan-created content?" Arguing for the importance of fanworks, she notes the changing way that fanworks can affect the marketplace. "A music video taking a song from one artist and clips from a television show by someone else promotes both of them. For free. I personally have whole playlists of songs that I first discovered through these means. I have become interested in TV shows because I saw amazing videos about the characters. People have made money from me not because of cinemas or DVD specials or the radio, but because something I saw on YouTube took my breath away."

If you want to share how your experiences in fandom have changed, why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW. Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Here's a roundup of stories about gendered aspects of fandom that might be of interest to fans:

• Conversations on various fan sites continue to revolve around creator reluctance to feature female characters in their work. One gamer discusses how "the fact that you have to play as a man puts [his significant other] off just enough that she’d just rather play another game", and notes that "As a white man, I can only really imagine this position of disassociation. There are few games which force you to play as a woman."
  


• Of course, it isn't just a lack of representation but also the way that women are treated as gamers that affects their enjoyment, something which escapes the attention of many male players. The creator of online comic The Oatmeal discovered this after he received angry responses to a panel he drew about female gamers having advantages simply for being female. "Citing surprise and ignorance about the violence female gamers face, he withdrew his argument," and made a $1,000 donation to the Women Against Abuse Foundation, explaining, "A lot of people are talking of rape threats, sexism, harassment, and a lot of other awful things. I'm a guy and I barely talk into my mic, so I’ll concede that my view of things is probably very skewed." Unfortunately, these problems exist in most fandoms in different forms, as a post by hockey blogger Karen M pointed out. "What I realized is that in the world of hockey fandom women are like [Russian hockey players]. We are a minority group that are battling everyday against the weight of oppressive and offensive stereotypes. A Canadian coasts on a few shifts and he's 'having an off night'. A Russian coasts and he’s 'lazy and not living up to his potential.' In hockey fandom misogynist insults are common and women are dumb puck bunnies until proven otherwise."
  


• Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress suggests that women "even outside the core fan community, will be interested in fantasy and science fiction if work in those genres have anything to say to them." "Snow White and the Huntsman is being explicitly sold not just as a story with two female leads...but as a story about the connection between beauty and power, about competition between women, and about styles of rule and command. From the outside, the women in the movie don't look like women acting like men. They appear to be women acting like women but with the force of armies and heroes available to play out the issues that they're grappling with personally."
  


• The Mary Sue notes that good stories appeal to all sexes, citing the success of The Legend of Korra, which has a female lead. "Some Nickelodeon executives were worried, says [Korra co-creator Bryan] Konietzko, about backing an animated action show with a female lead character. Conventional TV wisdom has it that girls will watch shows about boys, but boys won’t watch shows about girls," writes NPR's Neda Ulaby. “During test screenings, though, boys said they didn’t care that Korra was a girl. They just said she was awesome."
  

If you want to share your experiences in the The Legend of Korra or Avatar: The Last Airbender fandoms, or have something to say about misogny in fandom, why not write about them on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Here's a roundup of stories about rare fandom activities that might be of interest to fans:

• As this article at the Daily Beast points out, "The surprise revival of Tupac Shakur in hologram form at Coachella...stunned audiences--but Japan's been onto the hologram game for years." The article discusses concerts performed by fictional character Hatsune Miku. "Though her voice is sampled from Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita, Miku is literally the collective product of her legions of fans...who create her songs and videos via collaborative websites...One Miku enthusiast might compose an original song for her using Vocaloid, for example, and then upload it for others to hear. That song might then inspire illustrations, videos, or remixes from other fans...It's the perfect formula: Miku gives fans exactly the music they want without the scandals and dramatics of real-life pop stars and all their real-life flaws."


• Fans of inanimate objects are legion as well. In a live-tweeted story, The Washington Post covered the journey of the space shuttle Discovery on its way to its future museum home in Washington, DC. "To the delight of fans on the ground, the shuttle completed extra passes over the National Mall and Dulles." The article wrote about varied people stopping their day or setting aside time to try and catch sight of the shuttle's journey. "At the National Mall, cheers, whoops, and hollers erupted from the crowd, entranced by the sight of a space shuttle anchored precariously on the back of a 747. 'It's a spectacular view to see the big shuttle on the back of a 747,' said JJ Morgan, a 70-year-old Silver Spring resident...His wife, Carol, was a little less jubilant. 'I’m a little sad because I can remember when the space program first started, and I'll miss it. I'll miss following it.'"


• "Nerdcore rapper" Adam WarRock has written songs about various TV shows such as Parks and Recreation, Downton Abbey, and Justified, but it was his rap inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, that made the news. Coates is a favorite blogger of WarRock's, one who WarRock sees as "a welcome and comforting voice when it comes to speaking on race and America, specifically America's complex relationship when it comes to race in all elements of our culture and ethics." The rap, called "Ta-Nehisi,""came partly out of [WarRock's] own struggles with racial identity" growing up as an Asian American in Memphis, Tennessee. But "even though 'Ta-Nehisi' covers more serious territory, WarRock still found room in the final stanza to squeeze in one TV reference, a nod to HBO's The Wire."


• Hollywood.com turned to a museum owner to discuss Three Stooges fandom as the new Stooges film adventure opened in theaters. Said owner of the "Stoogeum" Gary Lassin, "'Half thought it was blasphemy to try and make the movie, half were eager looking forward to it. Now that people have seen it, the people looking forward to it liked it, the people who weren't looking forward to it weren't going to see or didn't like it.' Lassin hits the nail on the head: babyboomers who grew up on Stooges aren't that different than the target demographic that clamors for the latest comic book movie or installment of Twilight. They just haven't had a movie to flock to the last few decades."

If you are in a small fandom, or part of Vocaloid fandom why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW. Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

The OTW Community Survey closed on Thursday 2nd May after its two-week run. An amazing 5986 people responded, which surpasses our wildest expectations. We'd like to thank everyone who took it and who helped to spread the word for making it such a huge success! We'd also like to apologise for the delay in posting about our preliminary results. We had originally intended for this post to go up the day after the survey closed, but unfortunately the mass of data involved and some unexpected commitments on the part of some key staffers meant that we weren't able to do this. We're sorry that we didn't post an update about the delay -- improving our processes to cover stuff like this is one of the things we're still working on. Thank you for your patience and your overwhelming response to the survey!

We wanted to cover lots of bases and get a broad picture of our userbases and their needs, which meant that this was a long survey! So we're especially pleased (and relieved!) that the completion rate was 82.2 % -- that is, 4921 people actually finished the entire survey and clicked the "done" button. (Don't worry if you were one of the other 18% -- we'll still be counting the results from partially completed responses.)

The high number of respondents corresponds with a humungous amount of data. Some of this will be reasonably easy to collate, while some of the free text responses will require more in-depth analysis. The final question ("Anything else you'd like to tell us?") alone yielded the equivalent of an epic Big Bang story: 60.000 words!

We've formed an internal workgroup who will help evaluate and publish the results. Due to the amount of data we're working with, this will be a gradual process, but we'll try to keep you up-to-date with the details as they emerge. We thank you for your patience while we get to grips with it all. The really meaty data may take us a while to collate, but here are a couple of tasty morsels to whet your appetite!

( Read more... )