fanfic forensics

How did the concept of professionalism become so dominant? And why is it assumed to be innately desirable? Professionalism has certainly travelled a long way in a short time. In the space of a hundred years, the words “professional” and “amateur” have virtually swapped places. At the end of the 19th century, an amateur meant someone who was motivated by the sheer love of doing something; professional was a rare, pejorative term for grubby money-making. Now, amateurism is a byword for sloppiness, disorganisation and ineptitude, while professionalism–as Humphrys suggested–is the default description of excellence.

Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”

Measurement is another fetish of professionalism, as if something that cannot be measured isn’t quite real. This was a central criticism by Sir Ivor Roberts, who wrote a stinging valedictory telegram when he retired as the British ambassador in Rome in 2006: “Well-conducted diplomacy cannot properly be measured. We manage or contain disputes; very rarely do we deliver a quantifiable solution. Indeed, we should be sceptical of ‘permanent’ solutions or models.”

What, given these circumstances, was a "high culture" author to do as his/her books piled up unsold in boxes at the press? As Martha Woodmansee shows in her very insightful and elegantly written account of the history of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, The Author, Art, and the Market, they set out to exorcise these ghosts from the sphere of "true" or "fine" art. Turning to the material conditions that underlie and prompt the re-evaluation of art by these theorists, Woodmansee details

Mendelssohn, writing in mid-century, argued that the singular purpose of a work of art was to have an effect on its audience and hence ought to be evaluated by its ability to move us. Three decades later Mendelssohn's pupil, Moritz, broke away from his teacher's enormously influential theories, removing art from the constraints of affectivity to which it had been subjected and arguing instead for its existence sui generis, responsible only for being a "coherent harmonious whole" (quoted on p. 18). Woodmansee explains this remarkable shift from Mendelssohn's theory of artistic instrumentality to Moritz's theory of artistic autonomy through an examination of the "far-reaching changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of reading material that marked the later eighteenth century" (p. 32).

too many readers . . . reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results" (p. 90). Moritz responds to this problem by "rescuing" art from the market and making a virtue of necessity: bad sales become the hallmark of "good" art.

he Death of the Author is an essay by the French literary critic Roland Barthes.

The essay argues against incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of text, and says that writing and creator are unrelated.

In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."

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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.

one is addicted to foreign studies.

t is really hard to tell something specifically about Polish fans without comparing them to American or British.

Polish fans do not have the past described by Coppa. During the communistic period it was very seldom for people to organize themselves like the fans from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Poles were not prohibited to be fans and fannish behaviors were not restricted and prosecuted. Polish audiences simply did not have the need of being fans.

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."

Scientists worship at the altar of peer review, and I use that metaphor deliberately because it is rarely if ever questioned.

Somehow the process of peer review is supposed to sprinkle some sort of magical dust over a text which makes it “scientific” or “worthy”, yet while we quibble over details of managing the process, or complain that we don’t get paid for it, rarely is the fundamental basis on which we decide whether science is formally published examined in detail.

There is a good reason for this. THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES! [sorry, had to get that off my chest]. The evidence that peer review as traditionally practiced is of any value at all is equivocal at best

open source software

spirit of 'open work' is decentralised

Nina Työlahti