Academic Evolution: Scholarly Communications must be Mobile - 0 views
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Genres of scholarship will change in terms of their length and their appearance as mobile computers become a primary outlet for intellectual work.
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Genres of scholarship will change in terms of their length and their appearance as mobile computers become a primary outlet for intellectual work.
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But perhaps even more significantly, scholarship on a cell phone will be more social and more interactive -- and therefore more aligned or coincidental with teaching. We may begin thinking less in terms of scholarly publications as vetted objects, and more in terms of scholarly activities being conducted by trusted authorities. This raises profound questions about peer reviewing practices, as well it should. We are going to find that sophisticated intellectual work is going to be conducted outside of the ivory tower, and those within those elite walls must find ways to articulate their skills and knowledge through these new intellectual mechanisms (hardware, software, social practices) -- or risk getting excluded from the more consequential conversations.
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Moe and the Potential of Fantasy in Post-Millenial Japan - 0 views
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If kawaii, or the aesthetic of cute, is the longing for the freedom and innocence of youth, manifesting in the junior and high school girl in uniform (Kinsella 1995), then moe is the longing for the purity of characters pre-person, manifesting in androgynous semi and demi human forms. This is called 'jingai,' or outside human, and examples include robots, aliens, dolls and anthropomorphized animals, all stock characters in the moe pantheon. A specific example would be nekomimi, or cat-eared characters. More generally, in order to achieve the desired affect, moe characters are reduced to tiny deformed 'little girl' images with emotive, pupil-less animal eyes
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I argue fantasy characters offer virtual possibilities and affect
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Moe is also used by fujoshi, zealous female fans of yaoi, a genre of manga featuring male homosexual romance. However, the word moe indicates a response to fantasy characters, not a specific style, character type or relational pattern. While some things are more likely than others to inspire moe, this paper will focus mainly on the response itself rather than the forms that inspire it.
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Ian Bogost - Against Aca-Fandom - 1 views
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But for the academic critic, I think the stakes are higher. One can like or dislike something, but we scholars, particularly of popular media, have a special obligation to explain something new about the works we discuss. There are plenty of fans of The Wire and Mad Men and Halo and World of Warcraft out there. The world doesn't really need any more of them. What it does need is skeptics, and the scholarly role is fundamentally one of skepticism.
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While media scholars do not solely write about what we like, the prevalence of books focused on "quality television" shows that appeal to academics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Sopranos, and now Mad Men—especially when compared to the lack of similar volumes or essays about more lowbrow or mainstream programs—suggests that taste is often more of a motivating factor for our scholarship than we admit. We should own up to our own fannish (or anti-fannish) tendencies regarding our objects of study, not regarding fan practices as something wholly separate from our academic endeavors by acknowledging how taste structures what we choose to write about. I'd push it further: the media scholar ought to resist aca-fandom, even as he or she embraces it. The fact that something feels pleasurable or enjoyable or good (or bad) need not be rejected, of course, but it ought to issue an itch, a discomfort. As media scholars, we ought to have self-doubt about the quality and benefit of the work we study. We ought to perform that hesitance often and in public, in order to weave a more complex web around media—not just to praise or blame particular works.
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In this regard, I disagree with Jason when he says that "humanities scholars don't typically brand ourselves as fans of our objects of research." I think this is just plain wrong, and not just for pop-culture scholars. More often than not, humanists in general get into what they do precisely because they are head-over-heels in love with it, whether "it" be television, videogames, Shakespeare, Martin Heidegger, the medieval chanson de geste, the Greek lyric poem, or whatever else. Specialty humanities conferences are just fan conventions with more strangely-dressed attendees. Humanists are doe-eyed romantics, even as they are also snarly grouches.
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Affective Aesthetics « Symposium Blog - 0 views
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But then that’s an argument Henry Jenkins has repeatedly made, here, for example, that parody tends to be male- and industry-preferred whereas the more emotional engagement of fanvids is often dismissed out of hand.
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Vidding thus is an art form that is both too subtly critical (because always inflected with fannish passion) and too polished aesthetically (because the aesthetic dimension does matter above and beyond the critical point being made) to, perhaps, fit into a quick overview of YouTube remixes. Still, as both a vibrant subculture of critical interpretive if not outright political remix culture and an sophisticated artistic subculture with its own aesthetic value system, fan vids certainly deserve to be included in any “Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing.”
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The academy has often been accused of unrealistic attempts of objectivity in the humanities in particular but even in the sciences. After English departments in the seventies destroyed the idea of an objectively created value system that can separate great from merely mediocre and bad literature, after anthropology departments realized in the eighties that observers cannot ever remain neutral and always bring their own biases to their field research; after queer theory and gender theory and critical race studies have brought the personal into the academic in the nineties; after affect theory has established itself as a field of study since–it amazed me that vidding may indeed have been overlooked in its merging of love and inquiry, affect and analysis, celebration and criticism.
Reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
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Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.[1] This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.
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Electronic Literature: What is it? - 0 views
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the practices, texts, procedures, and processual nature of electronic literature require new critical models and new ways of playing and interpreting the works.
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"literature" has always been a contested category.
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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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Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models | Scott | Tr... - 1 views
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n particular, recent work on online gift economies has acknowledged the inability to engage with gift economies and commodity culture as disparate systems, as commodity culture begins selectively appropriating the gift economy's ethos for its own economic gain.
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My concern, as fans and acafans continue to vigorously debate the importance or continued viability of fandom's gift economy and focus on flagrant instances of the industry's attempt to co-opt fandom, is that the subtler attempts to replicate fannish gift economies aren't being met with an equivalent volume of discussion or scrutiny.
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There are a number of important reasons why fandom (and those who study it) continue to construct gift and commercial models as discrete economic spheres. This strategic definition of fandom as a gift economy serves as a defensive front to impede encroaching industrial factions. H
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Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Introduction - 1 views
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These fans feel a deep sense of community and are engaged in a complex subcultural economy—using work time to write about copyrighted characters, teaching one another how to use complex technological equipment to create zines for free, and so on
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fan vids address many of the issues raised during my search for a perfect cover image: each draws from a variety of sources that may be familiar to a particular community of media fans but often are more obscure to other TV viewers. Explaining how and why a particular scene resonates for a fan may indeed rely on the shared knowledge of a story, vid, or central fan discussion.
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The story of media fandom is one steeped in economic and gender concerns, from the beginning, when women began creating the narratives commercial media wouldn't offer—dominated as it is by male producers—
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"Kinda like the folklore of its day": "Supernatural," fairy tales, and ostension | Tose... - 0 views
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show does not simply depict folklore, but uses it thematically, as a way of reflecting and commenting upon Sam and Dean's relationship.
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Supernatural makes transformative use of folk narratives
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Ostension is defined by Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi as "presentation as contrasted to representation (showing the reality itself instead of using any kind of signification)" (1983, 6). Or, as Jan Harold Brunvand describes it, "sometimes people actually enact the contents of legends instead of merely narrating them as stories" (2001, 303). Supernatural does not simply retell folk narratives, but actually performs the stories.
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From mourning to 'magic' | The Japan Times Online - 0 views
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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,
In Which Rolanni Flails About - 0 views
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I'm just as firmly in the "oh, youbetcha academia is the enemy" side of the road.
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What seems not to be understood is that academics don't study and write articles in order to Validate the object of their study. Academics study and write articles in order to Validate themselves. As more and more people become academics, they must look further and further afield for subjects, and lo! suddenly Science Fiction isn't genre trash anymore; it's a way to secure tenure.
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The message that many take away from their English teachers is that the only Right Way to read is by the Analysis Method, and yanno? after a long day? Much too fatiguing. Wanna watch a Jackie Chan movie?
When I Became a Mom I Put Away Childish Things | Geek Feminism Blog - 0 views
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And even as a convergence culture encourages and invited media property holders to create and engage fans, such behavior remains generally perceived as ridiculous, embarrassing, and often hidden–unless it revolves around more masculine exploits such as sports teams, of course. Fantasy football and wearing team colors are acceptable behaviors where fanfic and wearing Hogwarts uniforms are not.
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Not only are traditionally female fan objects and fan engagements devalued, the very gender identity of the fan thus becomes problematic: reading done in private by women is a selfish and time-wasting activity, and fannish investment is a selfish and time-wasting squandering of emotion. Mothers, however, are meant to focus their activities and emotions on one target only: their family.
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So what is it then that makes a fannish mom such a threat, such an offense? Fannish practices are a focus away from the children, from a mother’s duty to put her home, husband, and family first rather than to indulge herself, both literally and metaphorically.
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And even as a convergence culture encourages and invited media property holders to create and engage fans, such behavior remains generally perceived as ridiculous, embarrassing, and often hidden-unless it revolves around more masculine exploits such as sports teams, of course. Fantasy football and wearing team colors are acceptable behaviors where fanfic and wearing Hogwarts uniforms are not.
Japanese copyright law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
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Japanese copyright laws consist of two parts: "Author's Rights", and "Neighboring Rights", and as such, "copyright" is a convenient collective term rather than a single concept in Japan.
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Author's rights
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Neighboring rights
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