Talking With TV

Issue no. 9 of Transformative Works and Cultures came out yesterday; it's focused on Fan/Remix Video, and it looks amazing—I am really, really looking forward to reading the whole thing. It includes an essay I wrote with Joshua Johnson, a former student of mine, called "Toward an ecology of vidding." I'm really proud of this essay, and I'm hoping it will form part of the basis for a longer project, so I'm already thinking about how to revise and expand it. If you read it and have thoughts about it, I'd love to hear them; you can post comments at TWC, comment here, send me an email, whatever. All feedback is welcome: points you liked, points you disagreed with, points that need expansion or clarification, things we missed, anything!

As I was re-reading the essay for the final proofreading, I thought of something that was really important to me (I can't speak for Josh here) while we were working on it, but which was a little too meta to easily integrate into the essay itself, so I thought I'd write about it here instead.

One of the things I wanted to do in this essay was to write about a typical vid rather than an unusual vid.

( More about this under the cut )

I suspect that sometimes we downplay 'ship vids because we're worried that other academics won't take those vids seriously, or maybe even because we ourselves are nervous about discussing explicitly romantic vids in an academic context, but as a feminist I worry about this tendency. Saying or implying that 'ship vids aren't serious or aren't worthy of study, or are worthy only if they have some other historical or analytical significance, seems to me to be a profoundly problematic thing to do, so I'm hoping to counter this tendency more explicitly in my upcoming work.

...long post is long, but my point is that I had a blast writing about lamardeuse's vid, and I really appreciate her permission to do it, and I want to write more about the kinds of vids that I first fell in love with.

Vidders and vidwatchers! If you want to help renew the DMCA exemption we won in 2010, now's your chance: submit your comments in support of the exemption proposal by February 10th, 5pm Eastern Time.

You can send comments to OTW's Legal or Vidding committees, or you can send them directly to the Copyright office. If you're submitting directly, be sure to note class “7B” if your comments focus on decrypting DVDs or class “7C” if your comments focus on decrypting legally streamed or downloaded video where the video is not available on DVD. Or you can comment on this post and I'll make sure the comments get where they need to go!

Questions you might want to address (answer as many or as few as you have time for):

1. Why are you interested in making sure video remixing isn’t chilled by legal threats?

2. Why do you make videos? What message or statement do your videos convey? What audience do you want to reach? Or, if you're not a vidder: Why do you watch vids? What's valuable about them for you?

3. Why do you use sources that require decryption (such as DVDs, Amazon Unbox, etc.)?

4. How important is it that the video clips vidders use are high quality?

5. How important to you is getting timely video clips of current events?

6. Is there anything else you want to tell the Copyright Office?

In case you don't know the background on this:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) have put together a DMCA exemption proposal asking the Copyright Office to declare that breaking the encryption on DVDs in order to use video clips in primarily noncommercial videos does not violate the DMCA.

We won a similar exemption in 2010, but it will expire if not renewed. Plus, now we're asking for a new exemption for breaking the encryption on video from online download or streaming services (like Amazon Unbox) that’s not available on DVD.

Please signal-boost if you can!

The OTW Legal and Vidding Committees are preparing to propose a renewal of the DMCA exemption we won last time around--the one that makes it okay for vidders to rip DVDs--and we need input from vidders, AMV makers, and other fan video artists.

(For some background on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the exemption, and the Motion Picture Association of America's absurd proposal about how vidders should get digital files without ripping DVDs, I recommend this short clip, featuring audio and video from the 2009 exemption hearings.)

From the original post at the OTW blog:

If you vid or make other forms of fan video by ripping DVDs or Blueray discs; if you rip footage from a streaming service like Hulu, iTunes Streaming, or Amazon Unbox, please get in touch! You don't have to use your real name: Depending on your choice, we can describe you using your pseudonym or as "a vidder" or "a fan filmmaker." We are trying to compile stories of how fans work and what they need to make their fanworks.

We are seeking your own words about:
(1) Why vidding is a transformative and creative act;
(2) Why you need to circumvent (rip) DVDs or other sources such as Blu-Ray, Amazon Unbox, Hulu, or YouTube--we are particularly interested in cases where you were only able to find a copy of the source at one of the online services because the source wasn't available on DVD;
(3) Whether you've tried screen capture software and how it worked for you;
(4) Whether you could make use of the "alternative" proposed by the MPAA, which is that you set up a separate camera to record your screen as it plays the source;
(5) Why high-quality source is important to you, whether your reasons are technical or aesthetic or something else;
(6) Anything else you think we ought to know as we work with the EFF to put together our request!

So please contact Francesca Coppa directly (fcoppa at transformativeworks dot org) or use the Vidding committee webform.

We've already gotten some terrific responses--some blunt, some eloquent, all smart and valuable--and we would love more! I'm working on a formal statement that will be submitted along with the exemption, and the fan responses I've seen have a) inspired me and b) reminded me of some issues I might otherwise have neglected to mention, so, in addition to contacting the Vidding Committee, feel free to comment to this post if there's a point you'd like made or an issue you'd like raised.

For reasons related to teaching rather than research, I'm re-reading James Paul Gee's essay "The New Literacy Studies and the 'Social Turn'," which I have not read in many years, and in which I have just come across the following paragraph:

Sociohistorical psychology, following Vygotsky and later Bakhtin, has argued that the human mind is "furnished" through a process of "internalizing" or "appropriating" images, patterns, and words from the social activities in which one has participated. Further, thinking is not "private," but almost always mediated by "cultural tools," that is, artifacts, symbols, tools, technologies, and forms of language that have been historically and culturally shaped to carry out certain functions and carry certain meanings (cultural tools have certain "affordances," though people can transform them through using them in new settings).

It will, I suspect, surprise nobody to learn that I wrote "Vidding!" in the margin.

I am currently working on a new project on vids and vidding. My co-author and I have been talking and brainstorming and batting ideas back and forth, and we've gotten great feedback from the peer reviewers at Transformative Works and Cultures, and now we've reached the point where I have to sit down with the draft and all our notes and actually rewrite the thing into something that makes sense, has a clear argument, and so on.

The version that we turned in originally was around 7,500 words long, and the reviewers suggested streamlining it down to about 6,000 words, which we thought was an excellent plan. Of course, we also had quite a few gaps we needed to fill in. So over the past month we've made notes about what could be cut or condensed, but we've also generated some new material, and when I put it all together into one document this evening, the total is about 10,300 words.

*facepalm*

I have written enough by now to know that this is how I rewrite, like it or not: I add, add, add, add, add until the thing has blown up like a balloon (a word balloon! of death!), and then I print it all out and go through it X-ing out all the words, sentences, paragraphs and occasionally entire sections that are unnecessary, repetitive, or just plain wrong. Once that's done, I start being able to see the real shape of the thing, and that helps me decide what other pieces need to be deleted or condensed. And after enough whittling away, plus two or three rounds of reorganizing, I end up with something that might actually be worth reading. It just takes a while.

I'm a little afraid to dive back into the compiled draft tomorrow, because wow, that thing is a hot mess right now. But I'm also excited, because there are some ideas in there that I really do think are useful, and I look forward to excavating them and polishing them up and sharing them.

Last week, I received my contributor's copy of Metalepsis in Popular Culture, which includes a chapter I wrote on metalepsis in vids (and fan fiction, though I have to admit that the section on fic was not part of my original idea; it was suggested by the editors because they figured more people would be familiar with fic than with vids). I knew that the book would be quite expensive, especially in the US (it's an academic hardcover from a European press), so I made sure that the copyright transfer agreement allows me to distribute the essay online as long as I cite the original publication information (which is hardly a hardship, since the publication information is one of my very favorite things about the essay: I have a chapter in a book published by De Gruyter! this is really exciting!).

So here it is:

Metalepsis in Fan Vids and Fan Fiction. In Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 83-103.

In some ways, this essay is less accessible than my previous essay about vids; that one was relatively general, while this one is part of a very specific academic conversation about metalepsis and narrative theory. On the other hand, I think most fans will recognize the concept of metalepsis pretty quickly, even if the terminology is not immediately familiar. (For those who are curious about the terminology, I wrote a bit about metalepsis back when I first proposed the chapter.) And I think--I hope, anyway!--that the essay's account of laurashapiro and lithiumchic's "I Put You There" makes sense even without knowing all the ins and outs of the narrative theory elements.

---

In other news, I am continuing to work on several other essays on vids, including one that I just came up with a couple of weeks ago while at the Computers & Writing conference. I was talking with a couple of the people who'd attended my presentation, explaining the various vid-related academic projects I'm working on, and it occurred to me that while I've made some complicated arguments about vids in relation to film studies, rhetoric, narrative theory, copyright law, and composition studies, I haven't really written anything that lays out the fundamentals of how I think vids work and why I think they should be interesting to the academic audiences with whom I'm usually communicating.

Duh.

I mean, I know why I haven't written that essay yet: I jumped into writing about vids because of two specific calls for papers that got me started thinking about vids in very particular ways. But I did have a moment of *facepalm* when I realized that I'd been going about things a bit backwards. I've got all these ideas and assumptions about how vids work which I talk about when I present on vids but which I haven't actually written down anywhere. I should write them down! And as I do, I need to be careful to convey how many of the ideas have been worked out and codified within the vidding community more generally; it's important to me that non-fannish academics understand the extent to which fans are self-theorizing.

So that very basic essay--not a history of vidding, but an explanation of how meaning gets created when making and watching vids and why this meaning-making is interesting from an academic point of view--is now on my to-do list for the summer.

I am finding that writing about vids is very much like vidding: just when I think I've gotten the queue under control, there are more ideas. And, just as with vidding, more ideas is a prospect simultaneously exciting and exhausting.

I spent a couple of months this winter working on a research project that predates my work on vids and vidding: an academic essay that I wrote quite some time ago is finally going to be published this year, and I've been revising it to get it ready to go. I mention this only because the reviewers' comments made me see that some of the things I've been thinking about vids apply to other literary forms more specifically than I'd previously realized. So my extensive revisions to the article included the incorporation of some language that I've developed for talking about vids, and the editor was pleased with the changes. \o/

But in recent weeks I've been thinking and writing about vids again: working on an article to submit to the Transformative Works and Culture special issue on remix video, prepping for a couple of conference presentations this spring.

The exciting news there (and the reason for the title of this post) is that the Computers & Writing conference proposal reviewers responded to my proposal for a standard stand-at-the-front-of-the-room-and-talk presentation by saying "Vidding looks really interesting! And complicated! And we think you need to do a 75-minute mini-workshop on it rather than just a 15-minute talk, so you can explain the history and show more vids and lead a discussion of vids' pedagogical potential."

As a native midwesterner who has, however unwillingly, absorbed certain gendered behavioral norms, my immediate impulse was to say "Oh, gosh, are you sure? Really? Me?" Fortunately, I overcame this impulse (with the help of my fannish impulses, which were shouting YES SHARE THE SHINY FUN THINGS WITH OTHER PEOPLE WHO MIGHT LIKE THEM) and said "I would be thrilled to run a mini-workshop on vidding! Thank you!" Because, let's face it, vidding is awesome and more people should know that.

Having 75 minutes to work with means, among other things, that 1) I can show more than one vid, and 2) I can show longer vids. I love Star Trek Dance Floor, but I've shown it at conferences so often simply because it's short. Of course, I am now in danger of paralysis induced by the sheer vastness of options available to me, but I think I'm up to the challenge of narrowing my options. I may ask for help, though. :D

This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth ( comments). Comment wherever you prefer.

I've spent most of the last couple of months wrapping up some older research projects that predate my work on vids (although one of them, I think, has ended up being much stronger as a result of my work on vids!). But there are two important things going on this week that I had to make time to post about.

First: OTW membership and donation drive! I am ridiculously excited about some of the new donation premiums, especially the tote bag, but mostly I am excited about the chance to contribute to the amazing work that the OTW is doing -- or, rather, that the OTW is enabling fans to do for ourselves by providing an organizational structure that helps us pool our energy and expertise, teach each other new skills, provide stable homes for the fanworks we produce and share, and much more. And, of course, donating means membership, and membership means the chance to vote in the upcoming board elections.

A second matching donation challenge has just been posted, so it's the perfect time to donate!

Second: Open Access Week! My own commitment to open access began with fandom and has grown through my work on the staff of Transformative Works and Cultures, the OTW's online open-access academic journal. Karen Hellekson, one of TWC's co-editors, has written eloquently about the importance of open access and online publication; like her, I'm proud to be part of a journal and a movement that are changing the way academics share ideas.

In that spirit, I'm making available .pdfs of my first article on vids, published last spring:

"Your Own Imagination": Vidding And Vidwatching As Collaborative Interpretation. Film & Film Culture 5 (2010): 88-110. [AKA the one about "Vogue" and "Ring Them Bells." This is the article as it appears in print; unfortunately, some of the formatting came out a bit wonky and I confess I find the two-column format difficult to read because of the odd spacing, so I'm also posting a reformatted version that is less official but more readable.]

I've got another article in an anthology that should be coming out soon, which I'll share as soon as I've got the final version in hand!

This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth ( comments). Comment wherever you prefer.

Quick note on VividCon: I am still figuring out the best way to find mutually agreeable interview times, but I should be emailing people about that today or tomorrow. (VividCon! Yay!)

And now the real point of this post: Let's talk about vids that own their songs.

Song choice is one of those perennial discussion topics for vidders and vidwatchers (and also the subject of one of my favorite sequences in OTW's documentary series on vidding, where a bunch of fans are asked what makes a good vid and "song choice" is the first response from something like half a dozen people). It's a topic I find fascinating, because a vidder's or viewer's sense of what constitutes a good--or perfect--song choice is profoundly subjective, and so there are song choices about which people strongly disagree, but there are also song choices that produce pretty broad consensus about their awesomeness or appropriateness.

nestra made a post several years back about the difference between good song choice and genius song choice, and sherrold made a comment to that post that has stuck with me ever since, in which she said of astolat's "Uninvited": "I can't hear the song without seeing the vid in my mind's eye."

That comment, for me, captures exactly what it means for a vid to own a song--a phrase that made total sense to me the first time I saw people using it. Owning a song is a separate category, at least for me, from good or perfect or genius song choice, and I've been trying to work out what I think the difference is. There are plenty of vids where I think the song choice is terrific or inspired, but I can still think of the song separately from the vid. For a while my working theory was that the distinction has to do with how I first heard the song: if I knew the song before I saw the vid, or had pre-existing associations with the song, the vid was less likely to own that song. But then I remembered "Haunted," flummery's Odyssey 5 vid (which frankly owns EVERYTHING EVER, not just that song); I knew the song before I saw their vid, and in fact I'd already seen a pretty good vid set to that song, but once I saw their version? That was it for me. Whenever I hear that song--when it comes up on shuffle or whatever--I think of their vid. I hear "I will always miss you," and I see the earth blowing up. Similarly, gwyn and feochadn's Charlie Jade vid "I Remember" is set to an R.E.M. song I knew and loved for well over a decade before they vidded it, but once I saw the vid I realized that the song was always about trying to communicate across collapsing universes and I just wasn't smart enough to see it yet. These examples demonstrate that, for me, songs I didn't already know may have an advantage over songs I'm familiar with, but unfamiliarity can't be the full explanation.

But I don't know whether my experience is representative or not! So tell me: Do some vids own songs for you? What's the difference between great song choice and a vid that owns a song? What's it like to listen to a song that's owned by a vid? Do you see specific clips from the vid in your head, or does it just make you think about the characters and the show?

This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth ( comments). Comment wherever you prefer.

In May 2009, I joined Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa to testify before the U.S. Copyright Office DMCA hearings; we argued for a DMCA exemption that would allow vidders and other creators of noncommercial remix video to rip DVDs for the purposes of making videos that constitute fair use of copyrighted material.

Today, we found out that the Copyright Office has released the ruling, and... WE WON!

Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos.

This ruling is amazing, and yet, having seen Rebecca Tushnet testify, I cannot say that it is totally surprising. She was on FIRE, people. I hope to be that awesome one day.

I am very pleased to have been part of such a terrific group effort. The EFF submitted the exemption proposal, the OTW submitted a reply comment in support of that proposal (shout-out to Casey Fiesler for the huge amounts of work she put in on that!), and then there was the testimony itself, the written responses to follow-up questions from the Copyright Office, and... a lot of waiting.

And now we all get to celebrate, because seriously, WOW.

This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth ( comments). Comment wherever you prefer.