Textual Echoes: Nele Noppe and the 'open work'

[paceus]

I'm continuing to post my thoughts on the Textual Echoes fan fiction conference, held in Sweden last week. Here are the abstracts of the papers presented in the conference

Comments

[unjapanologist]

Thank you so much for the extensive review! I'll get back to you tomorrow, if that's okay -you raise a couple of very interesting points that I want to do a bit of thinkery on before blurting out random thoughts.

*is chuffed*

[paceus]

You're very welcome! I'm pleased to hear that I didn't get it all wrong. *g* I'll look forward to hearing more from you!

[unjapanologist]

You're encouraging me to be lazy in my own summarizing and just point to here when I finally get around to blogging about what I did in Umea :) I'm thrilled you liked the presentation enough to do such an extensive write-up.

she wanted to use open source software

Feeling obliged to mention that I'm not using only open source software. Sometimes, there just isn't an open source alternative that does everything I need some app to do, or I'm not tech-literate enough to make the open source alternatives work properly. Diigo, which I use for bookmarking, and Zoho Creator, the online database app where the datasets are located, are not open source. I hope I'll be able to go fully open source someday.

tv shows like SGA do certainly seem to require active participation from fans because the show is so flawed -- unrealistic, filled with plot holes, or otherwise unsatisfying and failing to meet my expectations of entertainmentThis is interesting. You hear a lot about shows/movies/manga getting lots of fanwork because they give a general

[unjapanologist]

So this is how fan works can be seen as adapting to a new worldview. There's been a lot of commotion around the internet and
file sharing and piracy -- how people share and download movies (...) This would be how I understand the electronic format and fan culture to be more in sync: we have
gift economy, we share our art work for free, and we use the internet in several ways to enhance our fannish experiences.Good point. I hadn't thought about drawing a connection between our technology-enabled tendency to just share and pass around any media we can lay our grubby hands on, and gift economy principles that power fandoms. It sounds a tad dangerous -if I connected fic to filesharing, I can imagine the cries of "You see, it really is thievery!". But intellectual property law has always been forced to adapt to changes in technology available for distribution. It'll have to bend to the rise of the internet at some point. If we're already standing on a barricade, we might as well start waving anti-copyright law banners while chanting pro-

[unjapanologist]

a great challenge for Western, English fan studies as well, to remember their cultural specificity

Exactly. It's not any sort of problem that so much fanwork and research is in English, but we should take care with any sweeping generalization about fans and their creations. 'English-language fan fiction' is a mouthful, of course, and I don't always make the proper distinctions either. A little more awareness about differences in fan cultures would be quite welcome at this point. I liked Piotr Siuda's presentation on Polish fan culture a lot, because it hinted at considerable differences between "my" fan culture and the fan culture of a country very close to mine, while I was always looking at the other end of the world (Japan) to find differences.

Maybe I should pester Kristina about a TWC special issue on non-English-language fanwork ;)

[paceus]

It's true that it can get cumbersome if you always have to make the distinction, be it "English-language fan fiction" or something else, but it's a healthy reminder that there are a lot of fan works and not all are in English, or by Western fans, and so on. I often say "fandom" and throw generalisations around that certainly don't apply to all of fandom!

A great idea for a special issue! I hope there are people researching such fan works, too.