Organization for Transformative Works News

Welcome to our second Archive news post! These regular posts are a venue for us to answer some frequently asked questions about the Archive of Our Own.

Please leave your questions about the Archive in comments and we’ll answer them in upcoming posts. (This is a space for more general questions – if you have specific comments about the design or usability of the Archive please send feedback on the Archive site itself, so it goes into our bugfix and design process).


This week we're looking at something quite specific: the way tags are used on the Archive. This is a bit more detailed than a lot of the posts we plan to have in this slot, but as tags work a bit differently in the Archive than on other sites you may use and we've had a lot of questions on them, we thought we'd do a special feature.

( Everything you wanted to know about tags--right under the cut! )

Mirrored from original post on the OTW blog.

Summary of a couple of panels on Day 2:

Automated DMCA Takedowns and Web Video: Scott Smitelli, a professional sound designer and editor, is the fellow who wrote Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System, in which he tried to test out the limits of YouTube's fingerprinting system for audio. Conclusions: the software is mainly interested in the first 30 seconds of a song, and can be thwarted by pitch or time alterations of over 6% (which may be unhelpful to the musically sensitive among us, but there you go.) Kevin Driscoll and others from YouTomb discussed the January Massacre: the massive increase of takedowns in December, 2008 and January, 2009. On a graph, it looks like takedowns have dropped off since then, but that may be deceptive: in fact, it seems like things are being detected so fast (within ten minutes) that YouTomb can't keep track of them, or to put it another way: takedowns are low because stuff's never getting UP in the first place. A suggestion: that it would be great if every takedown left a webpage with a card saying, "This has been taken down," because in many cases, people are not aware of what they can't have. Oliver Day, also from YouTomb, told a chilling story: the original filmmaker who shot the clouds that were used in the Anonymous anti-Scientology ads had his original footage taken down--not in deference to those ads, but in deference to a Huffington Post anti-Giuliani parody of those ads. As Day put it, "The power is with the powerful": even though the original filmmaker's footage was there first, it was assumed that he was infringing the Huffington Post, and not the other way around.

Who Owns Popular Culture? Remix and Fair Use in the Age of Corporate Mass Media: This was the panel hosted by Jonathan McIntosh and featuring animator Nina Paley (of Sita Sings The Blues, Neil Sieling from the Center for Social Media, political remixer Elisa Kreisigner, Karl Fogel from questioncopyright.org, and OTW Board Member Francesca Coppa. The panel largely discussed what the policing of online video and the over-enforcement of copyright means for artists, remixers, and those interested in free speech. Nina Paley answered the question literally, by providing a list of who owns popular culture--or in her case, literally, the songs, mostly from 1927-28, that she used in Sita Sings The Blues, while Elisa Kreisinger evoked many the important visual artists, from Duchamp to Koons to Kruger to Lichtenstein to Warhol, for whom remixing and recontextualizing pop culture was a key artistic move. (She also showed her remixes of the Queer Housewives of New York City.)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Francesca Coppa, Naomi Novik, and head coder Elz spent the day at the Open Video Conference in NYC today. The conference is primarily about building architecture for online video as well as open source software more generally, so you can see why we were interested. (We're keeping a close eye on the emerging technologies that might make a Vidding Archive Of Our Own more feasable and efficient.)

Some highlights from today's programming:

Independent Video Platforms: Representatives from various independent video spaces, mostly dealing with issues of social justice or alternative media, showcased their sites. (My favorite was India's Pad.ma, a beautifully designed digital archive designed to contextualize its footage and work in both high-bandwidth and low bandwidth situations.)

Emerging P2P Technologies: This was a glimpse into a wildly exciting and very near future: streaming from bitorrents. The guys at P2P Next are working on something called the Swarmplayer, which allows you to stream from torrents, which means that you can create a YouTube like video archive with none of the server or infrastructure costs. Imagine a video archive where you can stream or download or both, and where having a popular vid doesn't kill your bandwidth, it increases your download speed. Imagine being able to watch anything currently being torrented through streaming, on-demand. (You can test Swarmplayer now, though you can only watch two videos; the researchers say we can expect a full version to be released in November, 2009.)

How to Make a Political Remix Video: Political remixer and friend of the OTW Jonathan McIntosh has been showcasing fan vids on his site, politicalremixvideo.com. Now he's made what he calls a vidding-influenced political remix video critiquing Twilight, Edward Meets Buffy (Twilight Remixed), which he premiered at the conference. Vidders, he'd love to hear what you think, so check out the video (linked on blip; vidders might check out blip as a replacement for YouTube or iMeem.)

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Job: Experienced XHTML/CSS Coder

Description: We're now much further forward with the Archive, and we're badly in need of some front end skillz! The illustrious lim wrote the main style sheets for the Archive, but now that those are in place, we have many other front end jobs. The lovely Flamebyrd has been doing sterling work on some of these, and we're jazzed about the fact that Hope recently joined us to work on skins for the Archive, but there's a lot of work to do and we've yet to perfect our cloning technology. So, we're looking for people to work on some of the following:

( Read more... )

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

The OTW is pleased to announce that we will be partnering with the University of Iowa to create a Fan Culture Preservation Project.

The Special Collections department at the University of Iowa already has a strong interest in zines, and is making a concerted effort to collect zines and other artifact of fan culture (con programs and flyers, for instance) in order to preserve them and make them accessible to wider popular and research audiences. Iowa is home to a huge (250,000) collection of science fiction and fantasy zines and APA zines, as well as a collection of Riot Grrrl and Underground Music Zines. Media fandom is not as well represented, and they are eager to collect many aspects of fan culture, including all types of fanfiction.

The first major donation brokered by OTW is the Fanzine Archive, a collection of over 3,000 classic zines previously housed in Santa Barbara--over 62 boxes! The OTW was able to help the retiring archivist, Ming Wathne, save and protect this valuable collection. Special Collections is currently in the process of sorting and boxing Ming’s zines. Soon after that is finished, titles in the Fanzine Archive collection will be listed in a finding aid on the Special Collections website. We are currently helping other long time fans donate their collections to the library.

OTW and Iowa are eventually hoping to explore ways to digitize some of these materials, so that fans who want to see them will have access, even if they can't get to Iowa. (We are only talking about works where we have legal clearance; both the University of Iowa and the OTW are concerned about fan privacy first and foremost.) The Special Collections department at the University of Iowa is also willing to photocopy materials for a price of about $.25 cents a page, according to their standard procedures.

Moving? Apartment getting too small? If you have zines you no longer want (or more than you can manage!) but want to know they'll find a good home, please contact the OTW. We can arrange for postage to be paid and for UPS to come to your house to pick up the boxes. You might also consider leaving your collection to the Fan Culture Preservation Project or making arrangements through a friend.

Please help us preserve this important part of fannish history!

ETA: Hey, if you're in the area, check out the Star Trek exhibition curated by our FCPP partners at the University of Iowa! Where Many Have Gone Before: Re-launching Star Trek, on display until July 1, 2009.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Get updates on all your favorite OTW projects and committees: right under the cut!

( Read more... )

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Fanfiction writers and other makers of transformative works might be interested in the lawsuit brought by the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger and his lawyers against writer J.D. California, who has written a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" called "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye," which tells the story of Holden Caufield as an old man. Unlike fanfiction, "Coming Through The Rye" is a commercial work, but it'll still be an interesting case to keep an eye on. Read more about the case at CNN, with a more thorough legal overview courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Karen Hellekson, co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures, has a guest post on Fandom Research, a new blog which aims to be "a clearing-house for surveys, questionnaires, theses, dissertations, and other research pertinent to the active field of fandom studies." Karen's post is called, "Fandom research methods," and deals not only with academic standards like those of university or college institutional review boards (IRB) or The Association of Internet Researchers but also about fannish community standards for personal privacy: when its appropriate to quote, whether a LiveJournal or blog post is "public" or not, etc. Aca-fans and other fandom researchers and fanthropologists should check out both the post and this site.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Hello from AD&T!

Since the OTW began, we've been working away busily on creating the Archive of Our Own, buoyed up by tons of support from fandom. Now that we've been working on it a while, we know that people have questions. So from now on we'll be running a twice-monthly news post specifically about the Archive, answering some frequently asked questions. We'll answer a handful of questions each post, to keep it manageable for us and you.

Please leave your questions about the Archive in the comments of our blog (link below) and we'll answer them in upcoming posts. (This is a space for more general questions - if you have specific comments about the design or usability of the Archive please send feedback on the Archive site itself (so it goes into our bugfix and design process).

Your questions and answers for this session:

What is the Archive of Our Own?

(Most people reading will know this already, but just as a refresher before we start.) The Archive of Our Own offers a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting place for fanfiction and (long-term) other transformative fanworks: i.e. it is free to use and does not make any money. It is multifannish, and built on open-source archiving software designed and built by and for fans. It will be hosted on servers owned by the OTW, and therefore not vulnerable to a commercial hosting company deciding they don't like our stuff.

Sounds great! Why can't I create an account?

We're currently in closed beta and account creation is strictly limited. This is because we're still busy working on the core software for the Archive and acquiring the hardware which will host it. While we're in closed beta, everything about the Archive will change rapidly and things may break. We need to keep user numbers extremely low so our servers don't crash and we're not overwhelmed by feedback on the many bugs that still exist.

You can enjoy a lot of the features of the Archive without an account - please come and enjoy some of the stories already posted. We currently have over 4500 stories in 480 fandoms, so there's plenty to choose from! You can leave comments on fics without an account, and if you supply a valid email address you'll be notified when there's a reply.

We are adding new users very gradually, drawing from our pool of people who leave feedback about the experience of using the Archive. So, if you're really keen to get an account, leaving feedback about the Archive site there (not here!) is a good way to start.

I'm really keen to see the Archive come out of closed beta - why is it taking so long?

There are a few reasons why we've been in closed beta for what might feel a relatively long time:

• We don't own the servers yet! Buying and setting up colocated servers which can handle the kind of traffic we anticipate takes time and money. Our current server setup can only take a very small number of users. However, we're happy to report that our latest membership drive raised the money we needed to do this, and we're now almost through all the work required to turn the dream into a reality - more news on this very soon! \0/


• We have a small team working on the project. The OTW is entirely volunteer-run, which means that everyone involved has other major commitments which prevent them from working constantly on building the archive (although some of our coders pretty much are working constantly, because they are amazingly dedicated!) This is a big difference between us and commercial sites, who can pay full-time staff.


• The Archive is custom-built. We wanted it to meet the needs of fandom as it is now and as it might develop, so rather than just copying the features of existing archives (for example, the Automated Archive software built by our own Naomi Novik) we started with a list of dream features and tried to design from scratch. We think this will make a better archive in the long run.


• We want the archive to serve all fans. We're working hard to make it as accessible as possible to all users, and to provide an infrastructure which can support multiple languages. This is a massive undertaking, so it takes time to get it right.

How can I help things move faster?

• You can volunteer to join our teams! We always need more people to help work on the archive, not just as coders (although we would love to have more coders) but also to work on testing, documentation, translation, and so on. You can read more about volunteering to work on the archive at How you can help. If you're interested in helping, but you're not sure what you would do, then let us know your strengths and we'll figure out which team would be the best fit for you. If you want to code but have no experience, then don't be put off - we welcome beginner coders and are keen to offer training and support.


• You can become a member or donate. The more secure our finances are, the easier it is for us to support our servers.


• You can test the archive informally (i.e. without joining our official team of testers) by reading fic and trying out the other features, then leaving your feedback. This means we will pick up bugs quicker and will build the archive how you want it! (This also increases the chance of you getting a beta account, as we draw our beta users from the pool of those who have left feedback.)

When will you start open beta and how will I be able to get an account?

We can't make any firm promises for this yet, because we still have a few important things to complete (although now we know we can buy our servers, it's definitely on the horizon \0/). We're tentatively looking at moving to open beta at the end of the summer (northern hemisphere!) Accounts will still be invitation-only at that point, so our servers don't get swamped, and we're working on a plan for making sure that invitations are available to as wide a range of the fannish community as possible. So, watch this space! (And if you have thoughts on how you'd like to see invitations work, then feel free to share them with us.)

We hope this post answers a few of your questions! Please leave other questions and comments here. We won't be answering comments on this post directly - we'll put your comments into our pool of things to answer in future posts.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

A few items of interest to vidders:

1) As many vidders have noted, iMeem is no longer supporting embeds, and YouTube continues its policy of random takedowns. (Remember that you candispute a takedown if you believe your vid is a fair use!) A lot of vidders are therefore looking at other streaming services. Markus Weiland did a good comparison of the terms of service of many of the competing sites (including Blip, Dailymotion, Kyte, Vimeo, and others) in his article Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared. Worth a look if you're thinking about a new home for your vids.

2) This may possibly make fan vidders squinty-eyed: Swanswan caught that a male artist is exhibiting something that looks a heck of a lot like a fanvid at the Glucksman Contemporary Art gallery at the University of Cork. Swanswan aptly summarizes the issue: "I don't know whether to forward this on to the OTW and say look! Other people making vids and calling it art, awesome!! Or look! Some random dude does what we've been doing for decades and all of a sudden it's art?" Hey, it's totally art! And it was art when we did it 30 years ago, and it's art when we do it now! (And I'll bet we do it better!)

3) You might be interested in the upcoming Open Video Conference, June 19-20 in New York City. This conference plans to tackle a range of issues surrounding online video -- from codecs to content, to fair use, and beyond. "Open Video" is a growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video, which encourages and invites remix, collage, and repurposing (including vidding.) Featured speakers include: NYU's Clay Shirky, Harvard's Yochai Benkler, Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin, DVD Jon, Free Press' Josh Silver, EFF's Corynne McSherry, and many more. (OTW's Francesca Coppa and political remix vidder Jonathan McIntosh are scheduled to present some work there too.) For the full agenda, go to: http://openvideoconference.org/agenda/. Register at http://openvideoconference.org/registration/.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

The OTW gratefully acknowledges this shout out from Nat Torkington of the O'Reilly Radar. We agree that's something unfortunate about the "macho meritocracy" of conventional programming. OTW: a few small commits from our coders, a giant leap for female coders everywhere!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Join us in celebrating our unofficial 2 year anniversary: our first "fanarchive" LJ post went live on May 20, 2007. WOOT!

Find out what your favorite OTW projects and committees are doing: more info right below the cut!

( Read more... )

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

American University’s Center for Social Media and AU's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, in collaboration with Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, have launched a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law.

The video, titled Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend, explains the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video (which was worked on by OTW's very own Rebecca Tushnet). Like the code, the video identifies various kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. Of particular interest to vidders and fannish remix artists might be: "commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material", "use for illustration or example", "use to launch a discussion", and "recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works."



Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

The OTW belatedly joins in celebrating the restoration of Glockgal's Avatar site on Zazzle. As you may remember, Glockgal's store was TOSed ostensibly for violating Viacom's intellectual property rights, even though Glockgal's items were mostly textual expressions of her critique of the all-white casting of the new live-action Avatar film. Viacom was quick to assert that they support fair use and only take things down when they aren't creative or political; they also invited Glockgal to submit a DMCA counternotice. The OTW was happy to help Glockgal formulate and direct that counternotice, and we have been so delighted to see people from all around the internet banding together to take a stand against unfair takedowns. This (relatively speedy!) victory is a victory for all of us and proof that banding together and defending our rights works.

The takeaway? If someone is infringing YOUR free speech or fair use rights, SAY SOMETHING. TELL SOMEONE!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Greetings and Salutations! Calling all challenge mods, archivists, and people with vivid fannish imaginations! If you've run a fannish challenge, moderated a challenge community, edited a zine, or put together a themed rec list, we want to talk to you. If you've participated in a fannish challenge and/or have ever thought in detail about how to run a challenge, please also help us out!

We're in the process of developing the design for two essential pieces of functionality on the Archive of Our Own Roadmap, Version 0.7: Collections and Challenges.

As part of that design work we need to know how it's going to be used and understand what different people want from it.

To make this easier we're writing up a series of different scenarios describing how a person might use Collections or Challenges and we ask you to contribute. We want short stories describing ideal scenarios and we want them from the perspective of different people - moderators, writers, readers. Go wild!

Examples under the cut. Please leave a comment below; members of ADT (Accessibility, Design, & Technology; the Archive team) will be watching and collecting scenarios. (Please don't worry if your idea contradicts someone else's way of doing things! The AO3 needs to be able to work in multiple ways! And feel free to build on or respond to each other's ideas.)

( Read more... )

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

OTW board members Rebecca Tushnet (chair of Legal) and Francesca Coppa (chair of Communications and Vidding History) and TWC review editor Tisha Turk went down to Washington DC on May 7, 2009 to testify at the DMCA Hearings on Noncommercial Remix. Rule 1201 of Copyright Law prevents the circumvention of copyright protection systems (e.g. makes it illegal to rip DVDs or to hack your cellphone) but also requires the copyright office to hold hearings every three years to find out of this prohibition is adversely affecting anyone. In 2006, the copyright office granted an exemption to film studies professors, because the case was made that these professors need to rip DVDs to make high quality clip compilations to teach their classes. This year, there were a number of new proposed exemptions, including: educators beyond film studies professors (including K-12 teachers), documentary filmmakers, and vidders and other noncommercial remix artists.

The OTW previously submitted a reply comment in support of the EFF's proposed exemption for vidders and other remix artists. Tushnet, Coppa, and Turk went down to support this comment with live testimony. As you might have seen across the internet, the other side--MPAA, studios, the people who make encryption technology, etc--suggested that instead of ripping, professors, remixers, documentary filmmakers and others make clips by filming a flat screen with a camcorder.

For more information:

* Audio files/podcasts of the hearings are available at the U.S. Copyright Office's website and mirrored by the EFF on iDisk. (Our statements are part 2, the Q&A is part 3.)

* Rebecca Tushnet liveblogged the hearings: read the part about noncommercial remix.

* Wendy Selzer of Chillingeffects.org posted about the hearings and also livetweeted them.

* Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American University also blogged the hearings.

* Fred von Lohmann of the EFF has made a YouTube video summarizing the issues and focusing on the OTW and Rebecca Tushnet ("She's Awesome"). He also blogged his legal analysis.

* Rashmi Rangnath weighs in at publicknowledge.org.

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

The Wiki committee of the OTW is pleased to announce the formation of a Fanlore community on Dreamwidth. We needed a place for people interested in the Fanlore wiki to congregate, talk about pages (cool ones, ones with issues and concerns, plus general "how do I..." type stuff), and just keep in touch with what is happening on the site. We've been looking at various options for a place to gather, and Dreamwidth's open ID option makes it attractive; you don't have to be a member, but can comment using a free open ID account. (Note: if you do want to be a member of Dreamwidth, some folks in the community have been donating invite codes.) The community is also syndicated on LJ, so you can also keep in touch with what's going on here.

Please spread the word about the community, and about Fanlore itself. While some areas of fandom (and some individual fandoms) are well covered in the wiki, others are badly under-represented. We will be doing outreach to some of these under-represented areas, trying to get help and expertise, but please help us spread the word. If you know people who have been nervous about Fanlore or afraid they were "doin' it rong" (offhand assurance: you really can't do it wrong), please tell them that there's a place they can go to ask questions, either technical or content-based. Membership is open; everyone is welcome!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Earlier this week, fan artist Glockgal discovered that all but one of the designs at her Zazzle store had been removed "because they "contained content in violation of Viacom's intellectual property rights." But the shirts contained not only original graphic designs, but political speech, protesting the casting of Asian or Inuit characters in the film of Avatar: The Last Airbender by white actors.

Apparently, you need permission from Viacom to say: "Aang can stay Asian and still save the world" or "The Last Airbender: Putting the Cauc back in Asian" or "The Last Airbender: Brown/Asian/Colored Actors NEED NOT APPLY". These design were entirely textual, and obviously political: Glockgal called her store Racebending.com and contextualized its products as a form of political activism: "Stop Hollywood White-Washing of the upcoming movie The Last Airbender!" Glockgal is now selling some of the designs with "CENSORED BY VIACOM" plastered across them--but since when does Viacom own political speech about its products?

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

Kristina Busse, co-editor of Fan Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet and one of the editors of Transformative Works and Cultures, was interviewed in a Q & A for the upcoming Writercon 2009, a con dedicated to fannish and original writing. Kristina is going to be one of three special guests at the con, which takes place July 31 through August 2, 2009 in Minneapolis. For more information about Writercon 2009, check out their website or their LiveJournal community. Writercon describes itself as a con "about the writing and the shared love, not shipper politics or the plots of the shows, except as related to the fic. It's about how fan fiction is literature, and it's about showing that it's as worthy as any other genre of writing."

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

The Board of the OTW is pleased to announce the release of our 2008 Annual Report, which went live on our Reports page yesterday. The 2008 Annual Report is available both as a downloadable .pdf and as .html. A big thank you to all our staffers, volunteers, and members for another successful year!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.