Organization for Transformative Works News

A few events that might be of interest to readers of this blog:

* Göttingen, Germany. REMAKE │REMODEL: New Perspectives on Remakes, Film Adaptations, and Fan Productions: is an interdisciplinary conference taking place June 30 - July 2, 2010. The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2010; more information can be found on the linked call for papers.

* Boston, MA (and elsewhere!) On February 25, 2010, Lawrence Lessig will deliver a talk on fair use and politics in online video at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. The Open Video Alliance is webcasting the talk at http://openvideoalliance.org/lessig, or you can attend local screenings and events in many cities (check online for more details.)

* Los Angeles, CA, On March 25, 2010, Jonathan McIntosh, Julie Levin Russo (Stanford) and Alexis Lothian (USC) will curate an exhibition at California State University, Northridge called "Subverting Gender and Sexuality with Remix Video" that will feature PRVs (political remix videos) as well as vids. A question and answer session will follow the presentation.

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All the latest news on the Archive of Our Own behind the cut! Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.

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The OTW has formally been on haitus for much of this month as we reconstitute ourselves for the 2010 term. But of course, "on haitus" doesn't mean "shut down"--some of us can't leave (OH HAI POOR SYSADMINS), some of us don't leave (the Board and VolCom have to put the org back together again!), and some of us really should take a well deserved break but can't help but add a bit--more--code--!! (You know who you are.)

In our next newsletter, you'll meet the new committees and hear about what they've got planned for 2010. But for now: a few words from your favorite workaholics...

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It's worth reading OK GO's open letter to the people of the world in which they discuss their record label's refusal to make their new YouTube videos embedable - despite the fact that the immense popularity of OK GO's viral YouTube videos is what made the band rich and famous in the first place. OK GO apparently argued with EMI and lost, but they clearly think their label is being penny wise and pound foolish: the penny per play on YouTube may not be worth the loss of spreadability. To counter this, the band has also put their video up on Vimeo, which does (for the moment) still allow embedding, though they're aware this will split their hit count. But: "With or without this embedding problem, we'll never get 50 zillion views on a YouTube video again. That moment – the dawn of internet video – is gone. The internet isn’t as anarchic as it was then. Now there are Madison Avenue firms that specialize in "viral marketing” and the success of our videos is now taught in business school." (Meanwhile, its worth saying that the band are clearly geniuses when it comes to spreadablility: their new song and video feature the Notre Dame Marching Band. The sound you hear is that of a million high school and college marching bands tuning up: there's more than one way to get your song out there!)



In other news, you can watch yours truly give a talk called Things We Don't Have In The Future...and How Fan Arts Can Help to the freshmen class at the University of the Arts, which is doing a shared First Year Experience called ReMix, ReWrite, ReAct. I served as tour guide to some fantastic fan art and vids: if anyone needs to be thinking about remixing and read-write culture, it's the artists of the future!

Public Knowledge sponsored the first annual World's Fair Use Day on Jan 12, 2009. You can see podcasts and read recaps of the events on World's Fair Use Day site, and OTW Board member Rebecca Tushnet blogged many of the panels: see her detailed notes on day one and day two.

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Merriam-Webster's online dictionary recently released its new additions for 2009 (you can see them here), and for those of us who work on OTW's academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, one new term stands out: fan fiction. You could hear our whoops of joy across town. Language geek that I am, I immediately tweeted and e-mailed all my friends in a frenzy of happiness. Not only had MW finally added the term to their lexicon, thereby acknowledging its importance to popular culture, but the styling I preferred was confirmed!

It's taken awhile (the term has been around since 1944, MW informs us), but at long last, fan fiction has been defined by an authoritative source—and for those employed in the U.S. publishing industry, it is the authoritative source; no other dictionary will do. MW defines the term as "stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the Internet." The entry concludes with the note that it is "called also fan fic," which is intriguing because this term is also styled as two words, although it does not have its own entry.

When I wrote the first style sheet for TWC, I struggled with the styling of this common term. I really, really agonized about it. Ought it be fan fiction or fanfiction, the latter a styling that certainly got plenty of usage? In the end, I styled fan fiction as two words, precisely because it was not in MW. (If a potentially compound word is not in the dictionary, then it is styled as two words rather than solid.) I saw the term as two words in print but as one word on the Internet—but online, it seemed to always end up referring specifically to fanfiction.net rather than just being a generic version of the term.

In addition to fan fiction, TWC (against OTW's house style, you may have noticed) styles most fan words as two words rather than one: fan art, fan artwork, fan vid, fan film. Mostly this is a result of the two-words rule, as none of these other potentially compound words is in the dictionary. But mostly TWC decided to treat fan terms as two words because fan is not a prefix. Turning the two words into one elides the active work of the fan by making the entire word about the artwork: it's fan fiction, a piece of fiction actively created by a fan. Styling fan fiction as two words foregrounds the active process of creation and keeps us—writers, artists, vidders, fans—in the linguistic picture.

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Hi everybody! Just a heads up that we're deploying new code and doing some database maintenance tomorrow morning (Saturday, US eastern time), so the Archive Of Our Own will be down for a few hours.

Stay tuned to our Twitter account, AO3_Status for more information. (Archive status information is also embedded on the front page of the OTW site.)

All the latest news on the Archive of Our Own! This post may also be found on the Archive of Our Own which is commentable by anyone with or without an AO3 account. Comments are disabled elsewhere as we would like people to be able to share in any discussion.

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Here's a case that vidders might want to keep an eye on. Vimeo is being sued by a number of record companies--EMI, Capitol, Virgin--over audio tracks, which "are too often unlicensed copies of full songs." You can read more about the case at arstechnica.com: Vimeo sued; have staffers uploaded infringing content? While the suit seems to want to leave some space for transformative works--as the article notes, EMI is "careful to say that it is 'not seeking to stifle creativity or preclude members of the public from creating original, lawful audiovisual works,'" it also wants to stop usage of "the entire musical work deliberately and carefully synchronized into the video."

Obviously we at the OTW disagree with the implication that the use of music "in careful synchronization" is automatically infringing. Music can be an interpretive tool, and vids are a form of speech: they show, they demonstrate, they make arguments. In a vid, music is not a "soundtrack"; it is an essential part of the argument and creates a new--intricate, and richly meaningful--whole.

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Welcome to our last newsletter of 2009: committee updates below the cut! We'll be back, better than ever, in 2010, so catch you on the flip side!

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As most of our users will know, the Archive of Our Own has been playing host to the popular multifandom challenge Yuletide Treasure, one of the highlights of the fannish party season. There've been a few metaphorical spilled drinks and broken glasses along the way, but we've been having a blast! There's been a lot of hard work from everyone on our team, and a lot of great new stories in the Archive.

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All the latest news on the Archive of Our Own is under the cut! This post may also be found on the Archive of Our Own which is commentable by anyone with or without an AO3 account. Comments are disabled elsewhere as we would like people to be able to share any discussion with each other.

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We're pleased to officially announce that the popular multi-fandom holiday fanfiction exchange Yuletide is coming to the Archive of Our Own! As those of you who follow our AD&T meeting reports will know, this is something we've been working towards for a while, and we're excited to finally have the code written and everything in place! \0/

The Yuletide mods will be running the challenge for 2009 on the AO3. Some time after posting closes for this year, they'll also be uploading the existing Yuletide archive (all the stories from previous years). This means that if you are participating in Yuletide, or have participated in the past, you will be offered an Archive account \0/. (If you already have an account, you'll be able to link uploaded stories to that existing account.)

Yuletide 2009 will be the first outing for our shiny new Collections and Challenges code, which will be enhanced and expanded in future. It's a great test case for us, because Yuletide mod astolat is one of our senior coders and has done most of the heavy lifting for this new code (which has meant VERY good communication between challenge mods and coders!). The Yuletide challenge is also fairly large and complicated to run, which gives us a good starting baseline of features for other fic-exchange-style challenges. Another reason we chose Yuletide first is that the Yuletide archive is at risk: the challenge has outgrown its existing code, and the mods needed to find another home or take the archive down altogether. We know it's one of the most popular multi-fandom challenges out there, and we're really pleased to be able to ensure that fandom can continue to enjoy it for many years to come.

This is the very first version of Collections and Challenges on the AO3 and lots of enhancements are planned for the future. Feel free to let us know your thoughts about the design and any future features you'd like to see via our Support and Feedback form.

Although Yuletide will be hosted on the AO3, it is still elynross and astolat's party! (We just built the dancehall.) If you have questions about Yuletide itself (how it will work on the AO3, what to do if your story is late, etc), please drop over to yuletide_admin. Lots of common questions are answered on their Yuletide on the AO3 info post. They have also posted detailed Instructions for Uploading Your Story to AO3.

We hope that this will be the first of many challenges to run on the Archive of Our Own. We're looking forward to welcoming lots more fandoms to the Archive and enjoying even more fannish creativity \0/.

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The OTW's Content Policy is pleased to put the following updates to the Archive's Terms of Service forward for two weeks of public discussion. The full Terms of Service can be found linked on the archive page, but for clarity, all emendations and new policy items are listed below the cut.

Summary of Changes: aka: the Bottom Line!
The TOS updates are based on a revision and clarification of the system for ratings and warnings on the Archive (Section IV.K), and the expansion of policy on Collections in response to new functionality (Section V.A). In particular, we are trying to make the warnings more intuitive in response to user feedback, though we remain committed to the basic policy that creators get to decide whether and how they want to use warnings. For more information on the new system and how it will affect users, please see our post on Changes to the Archive Warnings System.

These TOS changes are not yet final: we are currently offering them for a comment period of at least two weeks before the board votes on them, as per section I.A.2 of the TOS. We are soliciting feedback during this time. Comments must be received by January 1, 2010.

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We choose that you can no longer choose to choose not to warn for--wait, I'll come in again.

Based on your feedback, we've decided to eliminate one of our previous Archive Warnings: "Choose Not To Warn for Some Content." While it was meant to give users additional flexibility, feedback revealed that it was just too confusing. So there will now be only one opt-out tag, represented by a new icon, (which combines and clarifies two previous ones): "Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings."

But what are Archive Warnings exactly? There are two answers to this question.

1) There are six in all. Four designate particular content: major character death, underage, rape/noncon and graphic violence; the other two are "No Archive Warnings Apply" and "Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings". All stories in the AO3 must carry at least one of these descriptions.

2) They are enforceable; that is, if a story in the AO3 features major character death, underage, rape/noncon, or graphic violence without being labeled as such (or without you being told that the author has chosen not to warn for these tropes in this story), you can report that story to Abuse.

So why this system? To allow users to roam the A03 with reasonable confidence that they will not encounter these four things if they don't want to. (But click on a story labeled "Author has Chosen Not To Use Archive Warnings" at your own risk!)

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This post is mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Welcome to our weekly update from the chair of ADT. All the latest news about the progress of the Archive of Our Own is below the cut. This post may also be found on the Archive of Our Own which is commentable by anyone with or without an AO3 account. Comments are disabled elsewhere so discussion may be concentrated in one place.

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It's drawing in toward the end of the year, and we're all looking forward to doing end-of year things: breaking out the suntan lotion (Southern Hemisphere), breaking through the snow (Northern Hemisphere), breaking into shrieks of glee and/or terror (Yuletiders), and breaking bread with loved ones (holiday celebrants). But one thing you may have forgotten about is that the next few weeks are your last chance to qualify for tax deductions in 2009 (United States). If you've been thinking about donating to the OTW but haven't done so yet, you may want to take a look at your finances and see whether it would be to your benefit to do so before December 31. And if you're employed, please find out if your employer offers matching donations! Every dollar you give could be worth two dollars to the org. You can learn more about how to get your donation matched by your employer on the support the OTW page (scroll down to where it says, "If your employer offers matching donations, you may be able to double your gift!")

Of course, we're glad of donations of money or help at any time -- especially as we celebrate the open beta of the Archive of Our Own, now with more than 25,000 stories in almost 3,100 fandoms! If you'd like an AOOO account, you can add yourself to the invitation queue; a friend who already has an account may also be able to give you an invitation. And if you'd like to give of your time and effort as well as, or instead of, your money, please see our Willing to Serve post for descriptions of how you can help with the OTW's various projects.

And meanwhile, enjoy the sun, or the snow, or the shrieking -- and in any case, enjoy the stories!

Remember -- we're offering two premiums for your donation over US$50. Celebrate the OTW and get something for yourself this season!



This post is also available in English, Français, Español, and Deutsch at the OTW Blog.

While the fabulous samvara is still on well-deserved vacation, this week's update is brought to you by rustler. This post may also be found on the Archive of Our Own which is commentable by anyone with or without an AO3 account. Comments are disabled elsewhere so discussion may be concentrated in one place.

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The Archive of our Own now has its own Twitter feed for status updates, emergency notifications, and other quick messages: AO3_Status.

You can access this information in several ways:

* on Twitter
* embedded on the front page of transformativeworks.org
* as a LJ feed: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/ao3_status/
* as a DW feed: http://ao3-status-feed.dreamwidth.org/

You can get more news and information about the Archive at the A03's own admin blog: http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts. We also post Archive news to the OTW blog; find it using the archive-update tag set up for that purpose.

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This spring, Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) will launch a special issue dedicated entirely to Supernatural! The issue will deal with the actors, the show, the fans--and of course the fanworks! There's been a bit of concern about what works will be discussed and what the journal policy is on discussing them; be assured that TWC policy is to make sure that its authors are in dialog with fan writers and artists, and know that we are always aware of issues of fan privacy. If you want to know more, see the editors' policy statement here on our site.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.