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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.

As for why a straight woman writes gay romance, Penley suggests, it has to do with body politics. Women’s bodies are a political and social battleground. Women are told how to behave, and whether or not they can abort fetuses. They are held to impossibly high standards of beauty. Maybe they write with men’s bodies, she theorizes, because those bodies aren’t as problematic as their own. Maybe men’s bodies are just easier. Linda Williams, a Berkeley professor who wrote the first serious book about porn film, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” suggests a similar freedom — specifically, one from worry. When women watch straight pornography, there’s always the problem of who’s on top, or who’s on the bottom. “On the other hand,” Williams says, “if you’re watching two men having sex, you don’t have to worry about a woman being mishandled, or abused or overpowered.”Or it could simply be a fantasy of abundance. “If you presume that these women are heterosexual,” Williams adds, “and their own desire is for men, then you’ve doubled the pleasure.”Another prevailing belief is that the pleasure these women derive from reading erotic romances about two men has less to do with the sex than with the romance. The main pleasure comes from the romantic story, i.e., the plot. And the plots are essentially female. The sex is just the cherry on top.

The results for men, Bailey says, were as expected. Their arousal was “category-specific.” Men were turned on, in other words, only by the categories of people they prefer to have sex with. The women, however, had a different, far more surprising pattern of arousal: It didn’t matter whether the women said they were gay or straight, they were turned on by all the films. Bailey concluded that men’s and women’s brains are likely organized differently.As you might guess, Bailey is a controversial figure. That study, published in the journal Psychological Science, as well as his other research concerning the etiology of sexual arousal, has been attacked by everyone from The Washington Times and conservative congressmen to gay activists. (Bailey was also one of the first researchers to suggest that homosexuality is substantially genetic.)But why should a woman be turned on by a variety of stimuli any more so than a man? It may not make sense politically, but one of Bailey’s co-researchers, Meredith Chivers, might have found an answer by pushing the reasoning even further. She speculates that women’s genitals tend to lubricate in the presence of sexual cues as a defense against rape. Ancestral women whose bodies didn’t automatically lubricate during unwanted vaginal penetration might have sustained more serious injuries and would not have survived to pass the trait along to offspring. Becoming physically (if not mentally) aroused by a whiff of sex in the air, in other words, is evolutionarily adaptive for women. Which is not of course the same thing as pleasure. On that score, Bailey’s findings are reinforced by Abramson’s scientific experiments on masturbation from the early ’70s. He showed his subjects films of people masturbating to orgasm. As in the other studies, straight women were aroused equally by both genders. Abramson concluded that women are equally adept at imagining themselves as either the pleasurer or the receiver.

Fanwork The creative work done by fans for fannish purposes.

Media fandom ''Media fandom is generally used to refer to fictional, Western fandoms based on movies or television'' (from http://fanlore.org/wiki/Media_fandom). Books, comics, video games, anime/manga, and real people fandoms often intersect with, but also exist in parallel to, media fandom.

Remix culture Remix culture is a neologism that describes a culture of creativity based on previous creations. This is in contrast with permission culture, which aims to bind derivative creativity to the permission of the license holders. Both terms are simplified abstractions for current political and legal positions. (adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_culture)

In fact, it could be argued that queer theory's main project is not the interrogation of homosexuality, but the subverting and challenging of heterosexuality as 'natural' and 'unmarked'.

Queer theory's main project is exploring the contestations of the categorization of gender and sexuality. Theorists claim that identities are not fixed – they cannot be categorized and labeled – because identities consist of many varied components and that to categorize by one characteristic is wrong.

Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics, and having no stake in its own ideology, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. However, it is in no position to imagine itself outside the circuit of problems energized by identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations attract, queer allows those criticisms to shape its - for now unimaginable – future directions. "The term," writes Butler, "will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized."

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

I argue fantasy characters offer virtual possibilities and affect

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

the world's largest regular gathering of comic fans today is Tokyo's biannual Comic Market

dōjinshi phenomenon did not start with Comic Market, Comike and dōjinshi are inextricably linked, having shaped each other's history for three decades.

Comike convention has shaped the most important trends defining the development of dōjinshi in Japan today

That's because in Asia, "intellectual property" as we think of it is an alien concept, recently imported from the West and hastily transplanted with limited success at best. "It's almost like there's an institutional disrespect for copyright in Asia," says Seung Bak, cofounder of the video streaming startup DramaFever, which brings free, English-subtitled Asian television to U.S. audiences. "People feel like, 'If I can't touch it, why should I have to pay for it?'"

But Lam points out that things are fundamentally different now. For one, hardware used to be differentiated by where it was manufactured.

You have name-brand stuff and knockoff stuff being made side by side, maybe even coming off the same assembly line."

Eco distinguishes between the concept within aesthetic theory that every text is more or less open, because every text can be read in an infinite number of ways depending on what the reader brings to the text, and his more specific concept of the open work.

As examples

He also cites texts which on the surface are more traditional.