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Arthur Cane

Best Web Guys I Worked With! - 1 views

I love working with Syntactics Inc. web design Philippines team. Their staff are polite and can follow instructions. I have no difficulty in relaying what I want for my website. They even offered m...

website design

started by Arthur Cane on 12 Dec 11 no follow-up yet
Jeremy Brooks

Durable And Well-Designed Carport For My New Vehicle - 1 views

Before I had my new vehicle delivered, I made it sure that I could have a carport done. So I asked Outside Concepts the builder of durable and well-designed carports in Brisbane to make a stunning ...

started by Jeremy Brooks on 03 Oct 12 no follow-up yet
Nele Noppe

Open source - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology.
  • The open source model includes the concept of concurrent yet different agendas and differing approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial software companies
  • peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product, source-material, "blueprints" and documentation available at no cost to the public.
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  • Most economists agree that open source candidates have an information good[12] (also termed 'knowledge good') aspect. In general, this suggests that the original work involves a great deal of time, money, and effort.
  • Others argue that society loses through open sourced goods. Because there is a loss in monetary incentive to the creation of new goods, some argue that new products will not be created. This argument seems to apply particularly well to the business model where extensive research and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. However, this argument ignores the fact that cost reduction for all concerned is perhaps an even better monetary incentive than is a price increase. In addition, others argue that visual art and other works of authorship should be free. These proponents of extensive open source ideals argue that monetary incentive for artists would perhaps better be derived from performances or exhibitions, in a similar fashion to the funding of provision of other types of services.
  • Many fields of study and social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source.
  • Advocates in one field often support the expansion of open source in other fields. For example, Linus Torvalds said, "the future is open source everything."[14]
  • The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public
  • Open source hardware is hardware whose initial specification, usually in a software format, are published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying royalties or fees.
  • Beverages
  • Open-content projects organized by the Wikimedia Foundation — Sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary have embraced the open-content GFDL and Creative Commons content licenses.
  • Digital content
  • Health and science
  • Medicine Pharmaceuticals — There have been several proposals for open-source pharmaceutical development,[31][32] which led to the establishment of the Tropical Disease Initiative. Ther
  • Science Research — The Science Commons was created as an alternative to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific works in journals etc.[33] Research — The Open Source Science Project was created to increase the ability for students to participate in the research process by providing them access to microfunding
  • Other Open source principles can be applied to technical areas such as digital communication protocols and data storage formats. Open design — which involves applying open source methodologies to the design of artifacts and systems in the physical world.
  • There are few examples of business information (methodologies, advice, guidance, practices) using the open source model, although this is another case where the potential is enormous. ITIL is close to open source. It uses the Cathedral model (no mechanism exists for user contribution) and the content must be bought for a fee that is small by business consulting standards (hundreds of British pounds). Various checklists are published by government, banks or accounting firms. Possibly the only example of free, bazaar-model open source business information is Core Practice.
  • Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.
  • The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content.
  • The idea of an "open source" culture runs parallel to "Free Culture," but is substantively different. Free culture is a term derived from the free software movement, and in contrast to that vision of culture, proponents of Open Source Culture (OSC) maintain that some intellectual property law needs to exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods (as in "the Good life") and ends.
  • One way of achieving the goal of making the fixations of cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and digital media. I
  • Government Open politics (sometimes known as Open source politics)
  • Ethics Open Source ethics
  • Ess famously even defined the AoIR Research Guidelines as an example of open source ethics.[38]
  • Media Open source journalism
  • Open source movie production is either an open call system in which a changing crew and cast collaborate in movie production, a system in which the end result is made available for re-use by others or in which exclusively open source products are used in the productio
  • OpenDocument is an open document file forma
  • Education Within the academic community, there is discussion about expanding what could be called the "intellectual commons" (analogous to the Creative Commons). Proponents of this view have hailed the Connexions Project at Rice University, OpenCourseWare project at MIT, Eugene Thacker's article on "Open Source DNA", the "Open Source Cultural Database" and Wikipedia as examples of applying open source outside the realm of computer software. Open source curricula are i
  • stead of keeping all such knowledge proprietary. One of the recent initiatives in scientific publishing has been open access — the idea that research should be published in such a way that it is free and available to the public.
  • Open innovation is
  • also a new emerging concept which advocate putting R&D in a common pool.
  • Arts and recreation Copyright protection is used in the performing arts and even in athletic activities. Some groups have attempted to remove copyright from such practices.[45]
Nele Noppe

cupidsbow: "Let me show you my fannish entitlement" by cupidsbow - 0 views

  • What I'm wondering is: why do those opinions need to be justified with srs bzns??? I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with serious debate, but why can't fans hold strong, emotional opinions without an accusation of entitlement (or hysteria, or whatever othering word is in vogue today) being made?While I'm not condoning harassment of show creators, I do wonder why it's entitled to express shock and dismay over a text, or behaviour, or trends within these shows, particularly if they were designed to shock and/or dismay. Are we meant to feel it, but not speak of it? I also wonder why our performance of fandom, in all its inconsistency, lapses of judgement, sudden passions, genuine resistances, porn, critique and everything else, is a type of entitlement. Isn't this *makes a swirly hand gesture taking in all the complexity*, in fact, fandom in its very essence?
  •  
    "What I'm wondering is: why do those opinions need to be justified with srs bzns??? I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with serious debate, but why can't fans hold strong, emotional opinions without an accusation of entitlement (or hysteria, or whatever othering word is in vogue today) being made? While I'm not condoning harassment of show creators, I do wonder why it's entitled to express shock and dismay over a text, or behaviour, or trends within these shows, particularly if they were designed to shock and/or dismay. Are we meant to feel it, but not speak of it? I also wonder why our performance of fandom, in all its inconsistency, lapses of judgement, sudden passions, genuine resistances, porn, critique and everything else, is a type of entitlement. Isn't this *makes a swirly hand gesture taking in all the complexity*, in fact, fandom in its very essence?"
Nele Noppe

The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World - 0 views

  • copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies.
  • For three centuries, the publishing industry has been working very hard to obscure copyright's true origins, and to promote the myth that it was invented by writers and artists.
  • make sure the public never asks exactly who this system is meant to help.
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  • They're fighting to maintain a state of mind, an attitude toward creative work that says someone ought to own products of the mind, and control who can copy them. And by positioning the issue as a contest between the Beleaguered Artist, who supposedly needs copyright to pay the rent, and The Unthinking Masses, who would rather copy a song or a story off the Internet than pay a fair price, the industry has been astonishingly successful. They have managed to substitute the loaded terms "piracy" and "theft" for the more accurate "copying" — as if there were no difference between stealing your bicycle (now you have no bicycle) and copying your song (now we both have it).
  • Copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. There was no uprising of authors suddenly demanding the right to prevent other people from copying their works; far from viewing copying as theft, authors generally regarded it as flattery. The bulk of creative work has always depended, then and now, on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc. The introduction of copyright did not change this situation. What it did was allow a particular business model — mass pressings with centralized distribution — to make a few lucky works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors.
  • For the vast majority of artists, copyright brings no economic benefits. True, there are a few stars — some quite talented — whose works are backed by the industry; these receive the lion's share of distribution investment, and generate a correspondingly greater profit, which is shared with the artist on better than usual terms because the artist's negotiating position is stronger. Not coincidentally, these stars are who the industry always holds up as examples of the benefits of copyright.
  • The first copyright law was a censorship law.
  • The method the government chose was to establish a guild of private-sector censors, the London Company of Stationers, whose profits would depend on how well they performed their function. The Stationers were granted a royal monopoly over all printing in England, old works as well as new, in return for keeping a strict eye on what was printed.
  • The system was quite openly designed to serve booksellers and the government, not authors. New books were entered in the Company's Register under a Company member's name, not the author's name. By convention, the member who registered the entry held the "copyright", the exclusive right to publish that book
  • The Stationers' right was a new right, though one based on a long tradition of granting monopolies to guilds as a means of control. Before this moment, copyright — that is, a privately held, generic right to prevent others from copying — did not exist.
  • Dissolution of the monopoly might have been good news for long-suppressed authors and independent printers, but it spelled disaster for the Stationers, and they quickly crafted a strategy to retain their position in the newly liberal political climate.
  • The Stationers based their strategy on a crucial realization, one that has stayed with publishing conglomerates ever since: authors do not have the means to distribute their own works. Writing a book requires only pen, paper, and time. But distributing a book requires printing presses, transportation networks, and an up-front investment in materials and typesetting. Thus, the Stationers reasoned, people who write would always need a publisher's cooperation to make their work generally available. Their strategy used this fact to maximum advantage. They went before Parliament and offered the then-novel argument that authors had a natural and inherent right of ownership in what they wrote, and that furthermore, such ownership could be transferred to other parties by contract, like any other form of property.
  • The first recognizably modern copyright, the Statute of Anne, was passed in 1709 and took effect in 1710.
  • The Statute of Anne, taken in historical context, is the smoking gun of copyright law. In it we can see the entire apparatus of modern copyright, but in still-undisguised form. There is the notion of copyright as property, yet the property is really intended for publishers, not authors. There is the notion of benefitting society, by encouraging people to write books, but no evidence was offered to show that they would not write books without copyright. Rather, the Stationers' argument was that publishers could not afford to print books without protection from competition, and furthermore that printers could not be depended to reproduce works faithfully if given unfettered freedom to print. The corollary, they implied, was that without the prospect of reliable distribution, authors would produce fewer new works.
  • The authors who succeeded in selling this new right to printers had no particular motivation to complain — and naturally, we don't hear very much about the authors not so favored. T
  • This is the secret that today's copyright lobby never dares say aloud, for once it is admitted, the true purpose of subsequent copyright legislation becomes embarrassingly clear.
  • Having granted the premise that copyrights should exist at all, the English government found themselves under pressure to extend copyright terms further and further.
  • The industry's centuries-long campaign for strong copyright law is not merely a reflexive land grab, however. It's a natural economic response to technological circumstances. The effect of the printing press, and later of analog sound recording technology, was to make creative works inseparable from their means of distribution. Authors needed publishers the way electricity needs wires. The only economically viable method of reaching readers (or listeners) was the bulk print run
  • There is nothing inherently exploitative about this; it's just straightforward economics. From a business point of view, a print run is a daunting and risky project.
  • When one realizes that all this must happen before the work has generated a penny of revenue, it is little wonder that publishers argue hard for copyright. The publisher's initial investment — that is, their risk — in any individual work is greater, in economic terms, than the author's
  • The arrival of the Internet fundamentally changed this equation.
  • But today, the medium over which content is distributed can be unrelated to the medium in which it is ultimately consumed. The data can be sent over a wire, at essentially no cost, and the user can print up a copy at her own expense, and at whatever quality she can afford, on the other end [7]. Furthermore, it is no longer important to possess the master; in fact, the concept of the master copy itself is obsolete. To make a perfect copy of a printed work is actually quite hard, although making a corrupt or abridged copy is very easy. Meanwhile, to make a perfect copy of a digital work is trivially easy — it's making an imperfect copy that requires extra effort.
  • Thus, a publisher's total expense was proportional to the number of copies distributed. In such a situation, it is reasonable to ask that each user bear a portion of the costs of distribution.
  • Thus the practice of charging the same fee for each copy, regardless of how many copies there are or who made them, is now unjustifiable. The cost of producing and distributing the work is now essentially fixed, no longer proportional to the number of copies
  • From society's point of view, every dollar spent beyond the amount needed (if any) to bring the work into existence in the first place is a waste, an impediment to the work's ability to spread on its own merits.
  • The Internet did something the Company of Stationers never anticipated: it made their argument a testable hypothesis. Would creators still create, without centralized publishers to distribute their works? Even minimal exposure to the Internet is enough to provide the answer: of course they will.
  • Imagine the simplest scenario: you walk into the neighborhood print shop and tell the clerk the Web address of the book you want. A couple of minutes later, the clerk comes back with a freshly printed, hardbound book, straight off the Internet. He rings up the sale. "That'll be eight dollars. Would you like to add the one dollar author's suggested donation?" Do you say yes? Perhaps you do, perhaps not — but note that when museums charge a voluntary admission fee, people often pay it. The same sort of dynamic is at work in the copy shop. Most people are happy to pay a tiny extra bit on top of some larger amount, if they have their wallet out already and think it's for a good reason.
  • This is not the only possible system, and it can easily coexist with others. Those not convinced by voluntary donations should consider another method: the Fund and Release system (also called the Threshold Pledge system [9]).
Nele Noppe

Electronic Literature: What is it? - 0 views

  • the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works.
  • "literature" has always been a contested category.
  • To see electronic literature only through the lens of print is, in a significant sense, not to see it at all.
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  • Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast "digital born," a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer
  • At the same time, because electronic literature is normally created and performed within a context of networked and programmable media, it is also informed by the powerhouses of contemporary culture, particularly computer games, films, animations, digital arts, graphic design, and electronic visual culture
  • Digital technologies are now so thoroughly integrated with commercial printing processes that print is more properly considered a particular output form of electronic text than an entirely separate medium. Nevertheless, electronic text remains distinct from print in that it literally cannot be accessed until it is performed by properly executed code
  • immediacy of code to the text's performance is fundamental to understanding electronic literature, especially to appreciating its specificity as a literary and technical production
  • How to maintain such conventional narrative devices as rising tension, conflict, and denouement in interactive forms where the user determines sequence continues to pose formidable problems for writers of electronic literature, especially narrative fiction.
  • . "Giving the audience access to the raw materials of creation runs the risk of undermining the narrative experience," she writes, while still acknowledging that "calling attention to the process of creation can also enhance the narrative involvement by inviting readers/viewers to imagine themselves in the place of the creator.
  • Hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, "codework," generative art and the Flash poem are by no means an exhaustive inventory of the forms of electronic literature, but they are sufficient to illustrate the diversity of the field, the complex relations that emerge between print and electronic literature, and the wide spectrum of aesthetic strategies that digital literature employs
  • . Such close critical attention requires new modes of analysis and new ways of teaching, interpreting, and playing. Most crucial, perhaps, is the necessity to "think digital," that is, to attend to the specificity of networked and programmable media while still drawing on the rich traditions of print literature and criticism.
  • One problem with identifying the hyperlink as electronic literature's distinguishing characteristic was that print texts had long also employed analogous technology in such apparati as footnotes, endnotes, cross-reference, and so on, undermining the claim that the technology was completely novel. Perhaps a more serious problem, however, was the association of the hyperlink with the empowerment of the reader/user. As a number of critics have pointed out, notably Espen J. Aarseth, the reader/user can only follow the links that the author has already scripted.
  • ergodic literature
  • The shortcomings of importing theoretical assumptions developed in the context of print into analyses of electronic media were vividly brought to light by Espen J. Aarseth's important book Cybertext: Explorations of Ergodic Literature.
  • ," texts in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text"
  • The deepest and most provocative for electronic literature is the fifth principle of "transcoding," by which Manovich means the importation of ideas, artifacts, and presuppositions from the "cultural layer" to the "computer layer" (46).
  • arguing that print texts also use markup language, for example, paragraphing, italics, indentation, line breaks and so forth.
  • Complementing studies focusing on the materiality of digital media are analyses that consider the embodied cultural, social, and ideological contexts in which computation takes place.
  • electronic literature can be seen as a cultural force helping to shape subjectivity in an era when networked and programmable media are catalyzing cultural, political, and economic changes with unprecedented speed.
  • Liu urges a coalition between the "cool" — designers, graphic artists, programmers, and other workers within the knowledge industry — and the traditional humanities, suggesting that both camps possess assets essential to cope with the complexities of the commercial interests that currently determine many aspects of how people live their everyday lives in developed societies.
  • The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information
  • Realizing this broader possibility requires that we understand electronic literature not only as an artistic practice (though it is that, of course), but also as a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise.
  •  
    Hayles
Nele Noppe

Stuff Digital Humanists Like: Defining Digital Humanities by its Values - 1 views

  • there are different strains of digital humanities. Bethany might define those strains as “old” and “new.” I’d probably divide things along more disciplinary lines, looking to a tradition of digital humanities that comes out of literature and one that comes out of public history. If I had to place myself along these axes I’d probably land where the “new” and “history” strains meet. There are, of course, lots of other ways to slice the pie.
  • digital humanities starts to look a lot like a social network. Indeed, in some ways digital humanities increasingly is a social network built, for better or worse, on Twitter’s platform.
  • It takes its values from the Internet
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  • The procrastination principle (or “end-to-end argument”) is a design principle that states that most features of a network should be left to users to invent and implement, that the network should should be as simple as possible and that complexity should be developed at its end points not at its core, that the network should be dumb and the terminals should be smart. This is precisely how the Internet works. T
  • There is an analogous value in digital humanities. Innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations.
  • Digital humanities makes some similar assumptions in its commitments to open access, open source, and collaboration. As Bethany has said elsewhere, “how many other academic disciplines or interdisciplines work so hard to manifest as ‘a community of practice that is solidary, open, welcoming and freely accessible’ — a ‘collective experience,’ a ‘common good?’” We allow allow all comers, we assume that their contributions will be positive, and we expect that they will share their work for the benefit of the community at large.
  • It follows, therefore, that if digital humanities is a social network, then one of the things that will help us understand it better is looking at the things around which the network coalesces, the stuff digital humanists like
  • Like: Twitter / Don’t like: Facebook.
  • Like: Agile development / Dislike: long planning cycles
  • Like: DIY / Dislike: Outsourcing.
  • Like: PHP / Dislike: C++.
  • Like: Extramural funding / Dislike: Intramural funding.
Nele Noppe

A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture - 0 views

  • Fan community clearly cannot be constituted by anyone other than the fans themselves. This tenet remains central to the constitution of fan culture, just as it is continually renewed by the exchange of symbolic gifts.
  • they exchange personally charged aspects of themselves in a gift culture whose field of value specifically excludes profit, further separating their community from the larger (male-gendered) community of commerce.
  • To engage is to click, read, comment, write, make up a song and sing it; to hotlink, to create a video, to be invited to move on, to come over here or go over there—to become part of a larger metatext, the off-putting jargon and the unspoken rules meaning that only this group of that people can negotiate the terrain. Within this circle of [End Page 113] community—and in media fandom, women overwhelmingly make up this community1—learning how to engage is part of the initiation, the us versus them, the fan versus the nonfan.
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  • At the heart of this anticommercial requirement of fan works is fans' fear that they will be sued by producers of content for copyright violation. The general understanding is that if no money is exchanged, the copyright owners have no reason to sue because they retain exclusive rights to make money from their property
  • The notion of the gift is thus central to fan economy as it currently stands, although, as Abigail De Kosnik argues in her essay in this issue, it may be time for the community to consider creating an alternative model that will permit women to profit.
  • This exchange in the fan community is made up of three elements related to the gift: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.2 The tension and negotiation between the three result in fan creation of social relationships that are constructed voluntarily on the basis of a shared interest—perhaps a media source like a TV show or, perhaps, fandom itself. Fan communities as they are currently comprised, require exchanges of gifts: you do not pay to read fan fiction or watch a fan-made music vid.
  • Fans insist on a gift economy, not a commercial one, but it goes beyond self-protective attempts to fly under the radar of large corporations, their lawyers, and their cease-and-desist letters. Online media fandom is a gift culture in the symbolic realm in which fan gift exchange is performed in complex, even exclusionary symbolic ways that create a stable nexus of giving, receiving, and reciprocity that results in a community occupied with theorizing its own genderedness.
  • But the items exchanged have no value outside their fannish context. In fact, it is likely that they do not literally exist; fandom's move to the Internet means that the items exchanged are hyperreal and capable of being endlessly replicated.
  • Money is presented less as a payment than as a token of enjoyment.
  • The items offered as gifts are not destroyed but are incorporated into a multivocal dialogue that creates a metatext, the continual composition of which creates a community, and the rhetorical stance of that dialogue is to create a gendered space.
  • The gifts have value within the fannish economy in that they are designed to create and cement a social structure, but they themselves are not meaningful outside their context.
  • Each proffered item represents an aspect of the giver: time, talent, love, desire. The result—"personally charged"12 gifts, responses in kind—generates a female-gendered community, but the role of the individual within that community is equally crucial.
  • When the rules of exchange are broken, the punishment is swift. One recent incident that exemplifies this was the attempt of (male) venture capitalists to profit financially from (female-generated) fan fiction.
  • The FanLib debacle illustrates that attempts to encroach on the meaning of the gift and to perform a new kind of (commerce-based) transaction with fan-created items will not be tolerated. Henry Jenkins notes, "They simply hadn't really listened to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction."17 The site attempted to bypass the artwork-generating [End Page 117] fan community altogether—a serious misreading of FanLib's audience. FanLib broke the rules of the community's engagement by misreading "community" as "commodity," and the site failed thanks to intense backlash, an expression of fannish defense of their field of value.
Nele Noppe

From mourning to 'magic' | The Japan Times Online - 0 views

  • lishing firm which never had a best seller, but he was a great editor and the books he published were of a high quality [mainly on historical subjects]. He really dedicated his life to that quality, which I tried to inherit in terms of content as well as design. I think I achieved his dream of publishing good books which sell well. He couldn't achieve the second objective, but I did. My husband,
Nele Noppe

Doujin's Commercial Evolution - 1 views

  • Over the first years of the new millennium these trends continued, with a robust market emerging that combined improved distribution with wider interest to generate revenue for some circles that could no longer be termed “amateur” in any meaningful sense.
  • The doujinshi market grew steadily via promulgation through the internet and pop culture media. This resulted in the viability of the doujin as a means of part time and increasingly full time employment. “Kojin circles” emerged, consisting of a sole creator (kojin) who handled all aspects of production and received all the benefits of income from publications. Larger circles formed semi-professional units to produce doujin software that would compete with professional releases. Otaku goods shops expanded their scope as doujin vendors, acting as proxy sellers for hundreds of circles both via brick and mortar outlets and via online mail order. Online-only doujin shops such as DLsite emerged, selling digital copies of doujinshi via download. Advances in printing technology and cheap, high quality labor (mostly Chinese) allowed for the proliferation of doujin items to media beyond the traditional books (and less tradtional CD-Rs), including towels, pillowcases, fans, cups, trinkets, and figures.
  • new class of semi-pro and professional creators
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  • an increasingly large class of professional creators uses doujin sales as a substantial segment of their income, acting as freelance illustrators, mangaka, and designers when they’re not doing doujin work (and vice versa).
  • Perhaps the biggest issue raised by the emergence of this group of professional and semi-pro doujinka is that of intellectual property rights and copyright infringement.
  • in many instances the people producing the doujinshi are the same as those producing the original works being parodied. The doujin scene is so interbred with that of professional anime, manga, and game creators that it would be impractical for all but the largest IP holders to crack down on the parody doujin scene.
  • soft circles
  • Lilith’s business model is the culmination of doujinshi as commerce - small, versatile, ubiquitous, and high quality.
  • The doujin world now spans works from the rank amateur to the polished professional and everything in between,
Nele Noppe

Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex - 0 views

  • Manga sales in the US have tripled in the past four years.
  • Europe has caught the bug, too. In the United Kingdom, the Catholic Church is using manga to recruit new priests. One British publisher, in an effort to hippify a national franchise, has begun issuing manga versions of Shakespeare's plays, including a Romeo and Juliet that reimagines the Montagues and Capulets as rival yakuza families in Tokyo.
  • Circulation of the country's weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade.
    • Nele Noppe
       
      malaise in commerciële industrie
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  • Fans and critics complain that manga — which emerged in the years after World War II as an edgy, uniquely Japanese art form — has become as homogenized and risk-averse as the limpest Hollywood blockbuster.
    • Nele Noppe
       
      belang zelfexpressie, vrijheid in dojinshi
  • The place is pulsing with possibility, full of inspired creators, ravenous fans, and wads of yen changing hands. It represents a dynamic force
  • future business model of music, movies, and media of every kind.
  • Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga.
  • Comics occupy the center, feeding the rest of the media system.
  • About 90 percent of the material for sale — how to put this — borrows liberally from existing works.
  • Japanese copyright law is just as restrictive as its American cousin, if not more so.
  • known as "circles" even if they have only one member
  • by day's end, some 300,000 books sold in cash transactions totaling more than $1 million
  • "This is something that satisfies the fans," Ichikawa said. "The publishers understand that this does not diminish the sales of the original product but may increase them.
  • As recently as a decade ago, he told me, creators of popular commercial works sometimes cracked down on their dojinshi counterparts at Super Comic City. "But these days," he said, "you don't really hear about that many publishers stopping them."
  • "unspoken, implicit agreement."
  • "The dojinshi are creating a market base, and that market base is naturally drawn to the original work," he said. Then, gesturing to the convention floor, he added, "This is where we're finding the next generation of authors.
  • They tacitly agree not to go too far — to produce work only in limited editions and to avoid selling so many copies that they risk cannibalizing the market for original works.
  • It's also a business model
  • He opened Mandarake 27 years ago, well before the dojinshi markets began growing more popular — in part to provide another sales channel for the work coming out of them. At first, publishers were none too pleased with his new venture. "You think I didn't hear from them?" he tells me in a company conference room. But in the past five years, he says, as the scale and reach of the markets has expanded, the publishers' attitude "has changed 180 degrees." It's all a matter of business, he says.
  • triangle. "You have the authors up there at this tiny little tip at the top. And at the bottom," he says, drawing a line just above the widening base of the triangle, "you have the readers. The dojin artists are the ones connecting them in the middle."
  • The dojinshi devotees are manga's fiercest fans.
  • provides publishers with extremely cheap market research
  • the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.
  • Intellectual property laws were crafted for a read-only culture.
  • the copyright winds in the US have been blowing in the opposite direction — toward longer and stricter protections. It is hard to imagine Hollywood, Nashville, and New York agreeing to scale back legal protection in order to release the creative impulses of super-empowered fans, when the gains from doing so are for now only theoretical.
  • mutually assured destruction. What that accommodation lacks in legal clarity, it makes up for in commercial pragmatism.
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Social semiotics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice.
  • The crucial implication here is that meanings and semiotic systems are shaped by relations of power, and that as power shifts in society, our languages and other systems of socially accepted meanings can and do change.
  • This altered focus shows how individual creativity, changing historical circumstances, and new social identities and projects can all change patterns of usage and design
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Creativity in amateur multimedia: Popular culture, critical theory, and HCI - 0 views

  • Today, especially in academic circles, this pop culture phenomenon is little recognized and even less understood.
  • These analyses reveal relationships among emerging amateur multimedia aesthetics, common software authoring tools, and the three theorizations of creativity discussed
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      VERBAND FANWERK - OPEN SOURCE
  • This paper explores the enabling factors, especially the role of multimedia authoring tools, in the recent explosion of amateur multimedia.
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  • Yet control over popular culture by mass media is clearly eroding
  • HCI practitioners have explored how software interfaces can enhance and support users in general and creativity in particular. Its analytical tools for examining the relationships between tools and a concrete group of users vis-à-vis a well-defined explication of tasks both solve and create problems. The ability to specify these relationships explicitly greatly facilitates the design of systems; yet that same explicit specificity also defines creativity a priori in cybernetic terms more friendly to computers than to the culturally diverse and rich practice of creativity
  • Critical theory—an umbrella term that encompasses literary theory, continental philosophy, and communication theory, among others—offers sophisticated theoretical resources for the study of cultural artifacts and their use in the communities that create them. Many of these theories ground themselves in the materiality of the cultural artifacts they study; yet the material layer for which these theories were once developed were largely textual. The movement of cultural artifacts from the physical to digital poses a deep challenge (and some risk) for critics studying digital media with these theories
  • this paper investigates three relevant traditions of theory that address these overlaps: HCI, poststructuralism, and theories of technological determinism, especially in media.
  • Creativity—its nature, conditions of possibility, inputs and outputs, and processes—plays a major role in virtually all academic, professional, and artistic domains. As a result, it is heavily, and heterogeneously, theorized.
  • Genealogically, HCI developed alongside cognitive science and computer science, and was most often put in service of professional productivity software.
  • HCI often characterizes creativity in rationalistic, intentional, and scientific ways. For example, Schneiderman (2002, 2003) proposes a creativity framework for, in his words, “generating excellence” with four parts: collect, relate, create, and donate. With it, he hopes to capture the social, iterative, associational, and distributional characteristics of creativity, especially as described by cognitive science. Evident in this perspective is an effort to model creativity, which is seen as a social activity, with certain structural features that take place in environments conducive to creativity.
  • All of this is in service of what Schneiderman calls “evolutionary creativity,” which he illustrates as follows:“doctors making cancer diagnoses, lawyers preparing briefs, or photo editors producing magazine stories”(2002, p. 238). Here, Page 17 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 15 and pervasive throughout the essay, Schneiderman’s notion of creativity appears to be paraphrasable as professional innovation: His interest is not artistic self-expression and, as we shall see, he is not alone in understanding creativity in terms of professional discourses
  • Again, creativity is understood as it relates to professional discourses, in this case the discourse of art history and its pedagogical presentation to museum-goers. Even analyses of group creativity in HCI contexts that seek to go beyond rationalist- individualist notions of creativity nonetheless operate in a rationalist mode.
  • The notion of creativity that emerges from these mainstream HCI essays places its agency primarily in the intentional activity of the individual (though the individual is presumably a member of relevant groups). It sees the ecology of creativity as a community of expert practice comprising research, dialogue, and artifact exchange, facilitated by social and computer environments that forgivingly compel an iterative and basically scientific (correctness, discrete information, classification, hypothesis) approach toward truth.
  • The role of the author-function is, among other things, to control the polyvalence intrinsic to texts, such that the author, rather than performing the creative role of bringing the text into the world, performs the role of constraining the meaning of the text within a society.
  • (Foucault, 1969/2000, p. 206). Therefore, writing is a destabilizing force that threatens to transform the discourse in which it operates and to swallow up its own author. It is important to remember that Foucault is not limiting his analysis to literary texts; he explicitly includes scientific and academic writing,
  • In this conceptualization of writing, creativity occurs at the level of discursive rule- transgressing. The role of the historical human in this process is greatly diminished, not because humans are not involved in textual production, but because the individual is at the wrong level of granularity for analysis. A given historical individual authoring discourse does so within complex interactions involving several selves and the clash of languages
  • Related, but not identical, to Foucault’s notion of authorship are theories of “intertextuality” put forward by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Intertextuality is the notion Page 19 Creativity in Amateur Multimedia 17 that a text is a “tissue” of (mis) quotations from other texts, considered to be more than mere collages, but transformative, of the sign systems from which they are derived (McAfee, 2004)
  • Creativity’s agency lies in the juxtaposition of sign systems (in which authorial identities are implicated), which occurs in the context of play, and results in artifacts that are significant not for what they say, but for the ways they materially contribute to the generative capacity of the discursive rule-set from which they operate.
  • Perhaps the foremost theorist of technological determinism is Jacques Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), who argues that individuals, science, and government are all “conditioned” by technology.
  • Like Schneiderman (2002, 2003) and Foucault (1969/2000), Ellul (1964/2003, 1980/2003), too, is making claims about the origins and generation of knowledge in scientific discourses, but he situates the agency in the fierce pressures of technology as it overwhelms and often replaces the comparatively meek procedures of science and governance
  • As a result, according to Benjamin, our cognitive experience of the art also changes; whereas painting allows spectators to control their own stream of consciousness and reflect on what they see, cinema’s moving images disrupt association and contemplation, dominating viewers’ thoughts.
  • Benjamin’s (1936/1968) arguments are developed further by self-described technological determinist Marshall McLuhan, whose claim that “the medium is the message”(1964/2003) characterizes media as “extensions of ourselves” that “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance”(p. 31).
  • For Manovich, the emergence of new visual languages is enabled not by an iterative, rational approach to innovation, as cognitive science might suggest; neither does it emerge from an evolutionary history of discursive transgression, as a poststructuralist approach might suggest 10. Rather, it is made possible by certain forms of productive convenience built into authoring tools that unleash visual languages and cultural logics that exceed any human intention, whether at the level of the individual or the group of experts.
  • To answer this question, it is useful to consider what the three traditions share in common. All consider creativity in the context of professionalism and knowledge production. Creativity is not simply about painting a pretty new picture or expressing a personal emotion; it contributes to discourses about the world and our place in it. All three traditions also understand creativity as situated within systems—networks of software-supported experts, discursive sign systems, or systems of production and consumption. All of these implicitly reject romantic notions of the individual creative genius and pure self-expression; implied in this is a rejection or at least dilution of individual intention as the prime mover of creativity
  • Questions one might ask include the following: What are the social and technical conditions or structures necessary for the generation of these artifacts? What is the discourse of amateur multimedia? What is the minimal unit of meaning? In what ways does its production establish relationships between authors, viewers, technologies, meaning, and ideology?
  • A key first step is to understand how creativity is implemented in multimedia authoring software. Each program has ways it encourages authors to work. For example, Photoshop greatly rewards users who take advantage of layers, opening up avenues of possibility for compositing, nondestructive experimentation, and long-term editability. This in turn makes certain meanings (especially meanings created by the juxtapositions of spatial compositing) more easily realized than others. To what extent do contemporary authoring platforms encourage in the same ways (constituting and compelling a notion of digital creativity), or do different applications suggest different notions of digital creativity?
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Panton Principles - 1 views

  • Many widely recognized licenses are not intended for, and are not appropriate for, data or collections of data. A variety of waivers and licenses that are designed for and appropriate for the treatment of data are described here. Creative Commons licenses (apart from CCZero), GFDL, GPL, BSD, etc are NOT appropriate for data and their use is STRONGLY discouraged. Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.
  • The use of licenses which limit commercial re-use or limit the production of derivative works by excluding use for particular purposes or by specific persons or organizations is STRONGLY discouraged. These licenses make it impossible to effectively integrate and re-purpose datasets and prevent commercial activities that could be used to support data preservation.
  • Furthermore, in science it is STRONGLY recommended that data, especially where publicly funded, be explicitly placed in the public domain via the use of the Public Domain Dedication and Licence or Creative Commons Zero Waiver.
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  • Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge
  • For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open.
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Gender and Anatomy » Sociological Images - 0 views

  • Its striking that these notions about gendered bodies are inserted into even seemingly scientifically oriented things. Its a fair assumption that the designers for the site intended this theme for those who are participating in an anatomically related major, people who are being (or should be) trained to view the body, sans socially constructed gender norms. Yet, here, we see a prime example of gender presentation used in a scientific context… [A]re our doctors and scientists being instilled with these kinds of images throughout their academic lives? If so, its no small wonder why there are doctors and scientists who lend credibility to gender norms by operating on them as if they are nature, or why many people view gender as so fatalistically natural.
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