fanfic forensics

How important are small written ephemera such as notes, especially now that we create an almost incalculable number of them on digital services such as Twitter? Ever since the Library of Congress surprised many with its announcement that it would accession the billions of public tweets since 2006, the subject has been one of significant debate. Critics lamented what they felt was a lowering of standards by the library—a trendy, presentist diversion from its national mission of saving historically valuable knowledge. In their minds, Twitter is a mass of worthless and mundane musings by the unimportant, and thus obviously unworthy of an archivist’s attention.

As any practicing historian knows, some of the most critical collections of primary sources are ephemera that someone luckily saved for the future.

But let me set aside for a moment my optimistic disposition about the Twitter archive and instead meet the critics halfway. Suppose that we really don’t know if the archive will be useful or not—or worse, perhaps we are relatively sure it will be utterly worthless. Does that necessarily mean that the Library or Congress should not have accessioned it?

Humanities/Teaching Practices and Principles Inefficiency Thinking and reflection from a humanities perspective is anything but efficient. It's not about the straightest path to a goal, it's about exploring the various twists and turns along the way. Tell all the Truth, but Tell it Slant / Success in Circuit Lies. Specs/schmecs In the humanities, we want to open up as many possibilities as we can. Explore. Take a random path and see what happens. Your final draft of an analysis will always be very different from what you first thought you were going to produce. Complexify When's the last time you heard a humanist say or write, "I'd like to simplify that idea."? It's just not what we do. We like to "complicate the idea", "explore the nuances", "unpack the implicit assumptions". "Complexify". Scope-creep One of the hardest things to explain to a student in the humanities is what, exactly, it takes to move from writing a B paper to writing an A paper. If you are bold and tenured, you might tell them that they need to give "a certain 'je ne se qua'", to which the most likely response is, "WTF?". I think that what we want is scope-creep. Go beyond what we've covered in class. Explore things that you think are suggested in the assignment, but aren't explicit in the assignment. Move beyond the specs, and power through sorting out the consequences of doing so. Scope-creep is the bread-and-butter of the humanities. Maybe of any pursuit in academia, for that matter?

e privileged class

But they are indifferent to the point of depravity to the totalitarian, censorious and restrictive consequences of DRM, filters and liability. They aren't moustache-twirling supervillains. They're greedy, blinkered provincials and hypercompetitive macho bullies who are unwilling to look past the short-term benefits to the consequences. They think only of how things will work, not how they'll fail.

But they're a distant second to a rearchitecting of our law and technology to create the preconditions for repression, corruption and suppression of dissent.

Or will we allow a small gang of selfish and short-sighted entertainment companies to fatally compromise the infrastructure of the 21st century to add a few points to its bottom line?

I’d suggest that fan fiction exists within a fan community for its creation, distribution, and reception.

Basically my thesis is that in recent vampire fiction (both film and books) the vampire has undergone a change from a religious figure into a scientifically defined villain. In other words, whereas the crucifix used to be the best weapon against Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, the likes of Wesley Snipes and Kate Beckinsale are more concerned about biological weapons used against them. These are what I call the ‘old paradigm’ and ‘new paradigm’ celluloid vampires, respectively. 

In contrast, the modern vampires are represented explicitly as an outcome of a gene mutation. Their main motivation is not to spread ‘evil’ in itself, but to survive, and for some, to rule humans. Therefore, it is not a question of satanic vampires vs. good Christians, but a question of racial supremacy. Finally, as I mentioned above, the new films often employ metafiction in reference to religious symbolism, saying that unlike popular culture teaches us, ‘crosses don’t do squat.’ 

changing explanation for the reasons why these undead creatures come back from the dead as it chronicles a shift from supernatural to more “natural” and scientific explanations.

explanatory shift in zombie causality which reflects changing cultural dynamics in relation to religion, technology, and potentially apocalyptic anxieties

Behavioral Economics and Behavioral Finance are closely related fields making up a separate branch of economic and financial analysis using social, cognitive and emotional factors in understanding the economic decisions of consumers, borrowers and investors, and their effects on market prices, returns and the allocation of resources.