Talking Back to TV

In Media Res has just hosted a week's worth of posts about vids and visual storytelling; I got to write about obsessive24's Friday Night Lights vid "New Slang." If you haven't seen the vid, I highly recommend it whether or not you've seen the show; it's a master class in storytelling.

In case you're interested, here are the rest of the week's posts:

• Mafalda Stasi writes about Diana Williams' "So Damn Hot" (From Eroica With Love) here


• francescacoppa writes about lim's "Mission Report" (SGA) here


• Julie Levin Russo writes about beccatoria's "Moon vs. Sun" and chaila43's "Order in the Sound" (BSG) here


• Kristina Busse writes about Ash48's "At the Movies" (Supernatural) here

I had real trouble picking a vid to write about; there are so many wonderful narrative vids! And I had even more trouble keeping myself to ~350 words; I could do a whole vid_commentary post about "New Slang" or any of the other vids I was considering.

One of the things I was thinking about as I wrote was the argument I've made before that "the extent to which a song is a narrative by itself is one of the things that most strongly affects our perception of narrative as a vid genre: if the song tells a story, that helps us (forces us?) to interpret the images as a story." I still think this is true, but "New Slang" reminds me that there are exceptions to nearly any generalization about vidding. As I said in the IMR post, I don't think the lyrics of "New Slang" are doing very much narrative work at all; it's all in the visuals and in the way obsessive24 uses the song's musical structure. It helps to know the show, of course, but as I rewatched the vid I was struck by how much of the careful establishing work from the show--who these characters are, what their relationships are--is borrowed and condensed in the vid in a way that makes it really easy to follow. I think it helps, too, that this is fundamentally a relationship vid; we're all sufficiently trained in the visual conventions of representing relationships that those elements of the vid are relatively easy to parse.

Over the next few months, I want to start writing about vidding-related meta as well as vids themselves. With this in mind, I'm hoping to hear from as many people as possible:

What's your favorite vidding-related meta?

Link me to the public essays, discussions, vid commentaries, whatever, that you have found most personally interesting or useful or thought-provoking. I'm not looking for an exhaustive list; one or two links is fine (though feel free to include more if you can't narrow it down!). If you can't find or don't have time to look for the link, tell me what you can ("There was this great vidding chat about ____ in bop_radar's journal a few months ago..."). If it's a post or conversation from a mailing list (such as the vidder list on yahoogroups or a fandom-specific list) and thus can't be linked, again, tell me what you can and I'll try to track it down. Or, if it's easier, feel free to point me to your memories section or delicious links--although I really would love to know which of the posts on your list are your favorites, the ones most meaningful to you. And don't worry about whether it's something I've already read; old, new, well-known, obscure, on or off LJ/DW--it's all good. (I've read a fair amount of vidding meta, and I know what I find most interesting; now I want to know what other fans have found interesting.) It doesn't have to be by someone else; if there's something you wrote that you're particularly proud of, or that sparked really good conversation, point me to it!

Thanks in advance for any answers, links, and/or signal boosts!

First, a quick bit of bureacracy: I'm now cross-posting to DreamWidth (same username), so if you're reading primarily on DreamWidth these days, feel free to add me to your DW circle and I'll happily reciprocate.

And now, the main business of this post.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to give a presentation about my current research to the UMM campus community as part of our Thursday Afternoon Faculty Seminar (TAFS) series, and it reminded me how lucky I am to be at a school with such terrific students and such supportive colleagues. Quite a number of students showed up; it was wonderful to look out at the audience and see Caitlin, Josh, Katrina, Meaghan, Sophie, Taryn, and a few students I didn't even know! And so many of my colleagues came as well, not just from English and Communication, Media, & Rhetoric, but from Anthropology, Art History, Biology, Computer Science, French, from media services, from the library.

And I got to talk to all of these people about vids!

( more about the presentation under the cut )

( outline of the presentation )

Possibly my favorite part was after the presentation was over. A colleague and partner who are fans themselves (which I hadn't known!) came up to tell me that they appreciated hearing fans presented more positively than we often are (I should hope so! This is my own life I'm talking about here!), and to ask whether I'd seen "Women's Work" (why yes, yes I have). Another colleague came up to tell me about her experience making slide shows ("with strobe lights!") in the women's center at her college in the '70s. A student and I chatted about her interest in anime and manga (and I had to admit that my knowledge is almost all second-hand, although I did put my minimal familiarity with AMVs at her disposal). And this morning I got an email from a colleague in Computer Science telling me about Kolmogorov complexity and mulling over the ways in which it's related to what I'm writing about. Interdisciplinarity FTW!

The presentation was recorded and will at some point be available as a podcast; I'll provide a link once it's up. I admit I'm a little nervous about linking to it; as I said to someone after the presentation, nobody close-reads like fans do, and I'm fairly sure that anyone scrutinizing the presentation will find hundreds of things I could have explained more clearly, vids I should have mentioned and didn't, and so on. I just have to keep reminding myself that this presentation, like so much of my academic work, wasn't really for fans (though I was grateful to have fans there in the audience!). As fans, we do an excellent job of explaining ourselves to ourselves in ways that make sense to us; we don't need academics to explain us. But academics frequently don't know much about fandom at all, let alone the complexity and intelligence of fannish endeavor, or the ways in which understanding fannish endeavor might help us better understand things outside fandom, and that's the kind of work that I'm attempting to do in my current projects.

And speaking of current projects, I should be posting excerpts from or possibly .pdfs of forthcoming articles sometime next week. I'll be posting under lock, but am happy to give access to anyone who's interested.

I've just heard from the editor of Film & Film Culture: the article on vidding that I wrote for their special issue on Frontiers and Futures in Film and Digital Media has been accepted for publication, pending some relatively minor revisions. (This is the article about Luminosity's "Vogue" and sisabet's "Ring Them Bells.")

The reviewers' comments were generally quite positive, and their questions and suggestions are entirely reasonable. The final version is due September 15; I will hope to post a few excerpts from the article at that point if not earlier.

My first academic publication on vidding! I'm very pleased.

If you want to hear the presentations from the IP/Gender Symposium--including, but not limited to, mine--they're all available as podcasts. For more information about speakers and topics, including which speakers are on which panels, check the schedule. (I'm the third speaker of the first panel.)

A couple of weeks ago I attended (and presented at) the IP/Gender Symposium at the American University Washington College of Law. It was a terrific experience. I was particularly happy about the opportunity to engage in ongoing conversation with a relatively limited number of people; most academic conferences have multiple panel streams, but IP/Gender had only one, so nearly everybody was able to attend all the presentations, which meant that as the day went on more and more presenters referenced earlier presentations. The organizers also allowed lots of time for discussion, which I really appreciated. And I got to hang out and chat with some delightful people, including a few I had met before (Francesca Coppa, Kristina Busse, and the ever-fabulous par_avion) and a great many more whom I was meeting for the first time (Rebecca Tushnet, Wendy Seltzer, Casey Fiesler [author of "Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content"], Karen Hellekson [TWC co-editor with Busse], and the other presenters).

For a detailed account of the presentations and ensuing discussions, I refer you to Professor Tushnet's blog; she posted her keynote address as well as notes from the first panel (which is the one I was on), the second panel, and the third panel.

All I can add is that the most eye-opening moment of the symposium for me personally was Ann Bartow's response to the first panel. She observed that everyone on that panel (including me) had framed fannish participation as a privilege that women ought to be allowed because we're not interfering with anybody's profits rather than as a right we can demand because everybody has a right to free speech. As Coppa put it later, we've been presenting ourselves as the Cinderellas who have picked all the lentils out of the ashes and are saying "Can I go to the fair use ball now?" when in fact we already have tickets to the ball because we're citizens. And Bartow's exactly right: defining fannish fair use as a form of free speech that we don't have to earn, that we can simply assert, had just... never occurred to me.

For anyone who's interested, I'm reproducing the text of my presentation under the cut. Like any text intended for performance, it changed a bit in delivery--I always end up ad-libbing or elaborating on points as I go; but the text that follows is what I had in front of me while I talked. It's based on the post on narrative from several months ago, so much of it will look familiar to anyone who's read that post, but it does include some new ideas--largely inspired by Coppa's "Swap Audio" presentation on Thursday night, in which she began to explore some of the ways in which we might theorize vidders' uses of music, not just video, as transformative--and I have given that section its own cut tag so that interested parties can skip right to it.

( Transformative Narrations: Fan-made Videos and Fair Use )

( how narrative theory might help us think about the audio elements of vids )

Last night I spent a couple of hours watching and talking about vids with one of my senior colleagues who watches no TV and very few movies, listens to very little contemporary popular music, and generally doesn't engage much with pop culture. The goal was not to convert her to vidwatching--that was something of a non-starter, as you might imagine--but to familiarize her with what I do when I watch and write about vids; she suggested the session herself because she wants to be able to speak knowledgeably and effectively about my work when my tenure case is reviewed next year, which was an exceptionally kind overture for her to make, especially given her lack of personal interest in all things pop cultural, let alone fannish.

We watched sockkpuppett's "Vogue" and sisabet's "Ring Them Bells," since she's read my article manuscript about them, and then flummery's "Haunted."

Afterwards she turned to me and said "So most vids are based on movies and TV shows that are science fictional or feature lots of violence? Are there any happy vids?"

And while I could truthfully say that yes, there are happy vids and that no, not all vid source is science fictional or violent, I have to admit that I couldn't come up with a lot of examples. (In my defense, I was working off the VividCon DVDs, and the VividCon Premieres vidshows are famously heavy on the angst and light on the light-hearted.) I did show her tv_elf's "I Walk the Line" (because, hey, penguins!) and destina's "To Touch the Face of God" (because I had forgotten the explosion in the middle--oops), which are both lovely, though very different. We talked about why vidders (and fans more generally) gravitate towards the kinds of shows that we do, and also about how what vidders do is constrained by what's on TV, and how this affects, for example, the kinds of stories vidders can tell about women. I referenced geekturnedvamp's terrific "Relationships Between Women" vidshow... and am realizing as I type this that I should have showed my colleague fan_eunice's "Whatever It Takes," which I am now adding to my mental list of "intro vids for non-fans."

But now that I'm thinking about it, I would really like a better answer to the original question. So: what are your favorite vids that don't feature violence? I'll take recs of vids made from source that doesn't emphasize that kind of conflict or vids in which the vidder somehow worked around the guns and blood. 'Shipper vid recs are welcome, and in fact I could think of a fair number of 'ship vids that don't feature violence (and a fair number that do--oh, Buffy), but I find that 'ship vids tend to be fairly context dependent and also not particularly interesting to people not already invested in the relationship, so I'm primarily looking for other kinds of vids--though really, everything is fair game.

All thoughts welcome!

I haven't had time to blog in a while because I've been so busy actually working on projects! But deathisyourart nudged me for an update on my presentation for the IP/Gender Symposium (April 23-24), which I am in fact in the middle of working on. ( Hence, an update. )

As long as I'm posting, I have some ( other updates... )

And I think that's it! I'm going to try to resume more regular posting this month, and I will certainly be posting about the IP/Gender Symposium, either while I'm there (there could be liveblogging! ...actually, no, there couldn't--I can't multitask well enough for that) or afterwards.

It occurs to me that I never did post anything from the article manuscript I submitted to Film & Film Culture, the one focusing on "Vogue" and "Ring Them Bells." I'm not going to post the whole thing, but I'm willing to post excerpts if anyone's interested. Or, er, I think I'm willing; I haven't actually re-read that piece since I submitted it. So let's say I'm conditionally willing, the condition being that I have to be able to read the first three pages without wanting to bang my head against a wall.

This blog is mostly for nattering on about research-related topics, but in this case... well, there's a connection, as you'll see.

I opened the campus paper this morning to read the annual Valentine's Day LoveLines feature, and found this:

Tisha
You really are my biggest fan, and your students appreciate it. <3
Joss Whedon

Best. LoveLine. Ever. It's like they know me!

Maybe I'll let my seminar watch "Out of Gas" in class after all. ♥

Back when I first started writing in this LJ, I mentioned that I was interested in vids not only as a narrative theorist and rhetorical theorist but as a teacher and scholar of writing. Most of my posts so far have focused on narrative; in the next few posts, I want to write about what I see as the points of connection between vidding (and vidwatching) and composition studies.

( more about vids and composition )

Most of the vidders I've seen write about their processes have suggested that the song is the catalyst for the vid as a whole, the thing that snaps a vid idea into focus: there's a sort of free-floating desire to vid a particular show or character or relationship or idea, and then wham, Perfect Song, Must Vid! But I know I've also seen vidders write about coming up with an idea and looking for a song to fit that idea--I'm pretty sure obsessive24 has written about this somewhere, although I can't find the link--and that approach would be a really important contrast to discuss, since I absolutely don't want to homogenize vidders' processes; I'm interested in finding and examining patterns, but not at the expense of complexity and variety.

I've been working on this new vid-related research agenda for just about six months now, so I think it's time to pause and take stock of what I've gotten done in that time.

( grant proposals )

( conference proposals )

( paper proposals )

( other )

All of which is to say: I've been busy, and wow, I am tired. But some good things are already happening, and I hope for more to come. Thanks to everybody who's already helped nudge my thinking through e-mail conversations and comments on posts; it's much appreciated.

To my considerable embarrassment, I still (more than a month later) have not responded to a number of thoughtful comments on my last post. I would say "mea culpa," except that in fact I blame the very paper alluded to in that post for sucking away all my time. It's a bad sign, I feel, when writing one's seminar syllabus becomes a form of procrastination.

I emerge from my offline hermitage to report that I have fired off another paper proposal, this one to an edited collection on Metalepsis in Popular Culture. (Recall, please, that writing paper proposals on a lark is exactly how I ended up in my current predicament of having to write a paper to deadline. Apparently I just don't learn. Either that or I really want tenure. Possibly both.)

The term "metalepsis," like so much of narratology's wacky vocabulary, can be blamed on Gérard Genette, who coined the term something like thirty years ago and defined it as "transgressing the border between the world of narration and the world in which narration takes place" (except of course he wrote it in French, in which it probably sounds even more impressive). More recently, H. Porter Abbott has described it as "a violation of narrative norms, usually in which the diegesis, or world of the story, is invaded by an extradiegetic entity or entities, as for example when a 'spectator' leaps on stage and becomes a part of the action, or the 'author' appears and starts quarrelling with one of the characters" (Cambridge Introduction to Narrative 193).

If you're curious about the proposal, ( it's under the cut. )

I hadn't gotten as far as thinking about vidding in terms of metalepsis--my thoughts on vidding and narrative have thus far been much more general--and in fact am not sure I would have gotten there on my own at all, so this particular call for papers was especially welcome and useful. Whether or not the proposal's accepted, I'm grateful to the editors for pushing my thinking in this new direction.

I'm starting to think about the paper I'm writing for Film and Film Culture--no actual reading or writing yet, just some back-burner pondering. This post is sort of a warm-up for beginning that paper; I want to try to articulate a few general thoughts about TV and movie vids. I'm particularly interested in the reasons that vidders make (and viewers watch) TV and movie vids, and in the conditions that govern viewer responses to them.

( TV and movie vids )

( context & accessibility )

( Vogue )

Looking back over this post, it occurs to me that the real distinction might not be between TV and movie vids but between vids for source texts that have extensive and elaborated fannish activity and source texts that have smaller or less active fandoms (which also allows for change over time as shows gain fans or go off the air and the popularity of a particular movie explodes and then wanes)--a distinction that maps only partially and incompletely onto the TV/movie difference.

I should mention, too, that I know I'm oversimplifying by categorizing possible audiences into "fannish vidwatchers" and "nonfannish viewers." There are plenty of fans who just don't get vids, and plenty of others who come to like them eventually but take a while to get there; and there are people who aren't involved in media fandom but who know quite a bit about other aspects of remix culture; and there are people who aren't in fandom but whom we might describe as proto-fannish: they may not know much about fandom, but they're savvy readers of media texts, and when shown vids (especially vids for shows they like) they grasp the concept and understand the appeal pretty quickly. So we've actually got... not so much a continuum as a graph where X = fannish tendencies and Y = interest in DIY video, and individual people may be anywhere on that grid.

Which makes me think about Jason Mittell's thoughts on "Vogue" and Scooby Road, which I haven't engaged at all in this post. Mittell claims that Scooby Road is a better introduction to vidding than "Vogue" for someone who's an "outsider," who isn't, to use a phrase he borrows from Luminosity, a "contextual fan," but in fact his post suggests that Scooby Road works for him precisely because it enables him to position himself as an insider and to be a contextual fan: he knows Buffy, he loves Abbey Road, he's found a vid that celebrates things he's already inclined to celebrate. And that speaks, I think, to the way that fandom is a matter not just of seeing in similar (or at least related) ways, but of wanting similar (or at least related) things. Mittell dismisses most of the vids on Kristina Busse's list of recommended vids, saying that they left him "underwhelmed," which is fair; I've been underwhelmed by plenty of vids, and I love vids, plus, while I think most of the vids Busse recommends are terrific (at least the ones I've seen), I have reservations about some of them as intro material for non-fans. But I think that it's a little disingenuous to suggest that Scooby Road is necessarily a better introduction to vidding than "Vogue" (or many of the other vids on Busse's list); it was better for Mittell, it might have been better for me had I not already been sold on vids, but that's hardly a definitive sample. As a counter-example, I think of a proto-fannish colleague of mine who would, I suspect, find Scooby Road profoundly boring because she isn't interested in Buffy and isn't a Beatles fan, but who took to sockkpuppett's Highlander vid "Ability to Swing" like a duck to water because she is 100% on board with the premise that Duncan's hotness should be celebrated.

Which brings us back, once again, to the balance of context and content.

Just over a month ago, I sent a proposal for a paper on vids to Film and Film Culture Journal, which had issued a call for papers for their special issue on Frontiers and Futures in Film and Digital Media. I heard back from them last night:

Your proposed piece fits well with the theme of the next journal and we would like to invite you to complete it for consideration by the 22nd January 2009.

There's no guarantee that the paper will get published; it will go out for peer review first, and acceptance is contingent on the reviewers having positive things to say. Still, I'm hopeful.

Of course, this means I have to actually write the paper. Now, 4000-8000 words (~11-20 pages) on vids is not going to be difficult; I can write that much in a weekend. The difficult part will be 4000-8000 coherent words that make sense to an audience that will be largely if not entirely unfamiliar with vids. But one of my colleagues has already volunteered to play Dumb Reader once I've got a draft, and I know I'll be able to find at least a couple of vidders on call to be their usual fabulous Smart Reader selves. It's good to know I'm not in this alone!

I'm not sure what this development is going to do to my research agenda between now and mid-January; I have two other papers that I'd hoped to get sent out by the end of the fall semester, but I need to start doing my homework for this new project. I've never written for a film studies audience before, so I need to do some investigating of what that means in general, and what it means for this journal in particular. I need to start reading at least a few of the dozens of books that have arrived in recent weeks (I ♥ grant money). I need to re-watch these vids in a more structured and focused way than I've done in the past. And I need time just to think and draft and change my mind and re-draft and discuss and ponder and revise; writing is not a particularly speedy process for me if I'm doing it well.

Anyhow. If you're curious about the proposal itself, ( it's under the cut. )

So that's what I'm up to in the next ten weeks, although I hope to continue posting about my other vidding research plans as well.

Oh, and speaking of representing vids, vidders, and vidding to the outside world: the MIT/OTW New Media Literacies documentary series on vidding that Francesca Coppa and laurashapiro put together is now online, and it's terrific. The audience, as Laura points out, is middle school and high school students, so bear that in mind as you watch. I'm delighted to have been able to participate in such a nifty project!

In the comments to my previous post on narrative, cryptoxin raised some really thoughtful questions which prompted me to start clarifying my thinking on a couple of points. I'm reproducing the questions and (slightly edited and expanded versions of) my answers here for my own reference.

( Are you saying here that all vids are narratives -- or at least can be read/viewed as narratives -- from a narrative theory perspective? )

( If not all vids count or function as narratology-style narratives, what would constitute a non-narrative vid in narratological terms? Or are vids necessarily entwined with narrative, even when they're not, in fannish vidding genre terms, narrative vids? )

( And for that matter, would all of the songs that vidders use also be considered narratives, or only certain kinds of songs with lyrics that tell or imply a story? )

I'm interested in vids as narratives, and in this post I'm going to try to talk about what that means, because the word "narrative" gets used quite a bit in relation to vids, but not usually in the specific sense that a narrative theorist would use it. In a fannish vidwatching capacity, we typically use "narrative" to mean a particular genre of vid: a vid that tells a story. And we may also talk about styles of narrative, different ways of telling a story, as bop_radar and various commenters did in the vidding chat post "Defining Vid Genres and Narrative Styles" a couple of weeks ago.

These are perfectly reasonable uses of the term, but they are not quite what narrative theory geeks mean when we talk about narrative.

( what we mean by narrative )

( the parts of a narrative )

( film and TV as narratives )

( vids as narratives )

( interacting narratives )

The last thing I want to write about in this post is still very tentative, but I need to start sorting through it somewhere, so here goes.

( vids and the illusion of narrative coherence )

I recently applied for, and received, a $1500 grant to launch a new research project related to vids and vidding. The money's for books, and I'm having a great time purchasing all sorts of texts that I've been wanting to read for a while now: books on fan studies and new media and cultural studies, but also on narrative and composition and literacy studies.

And I'm in the process of applying for a single-semester leave--a paid leave in which I'd take a semester off from teaching in order to write and do research. (I'll need at least two months just to read all the books I'm ordering!) It'll be a while before I know the results, but I live in hope.

( So why this LJ? )

I'm writing within as well as about the fannish community--but I will also ultimately be writing for an academic community. When I do write about vids and vidding for an academic audience, my goal is not to come in and carve up fandom and its creative practices with the power tools of academic analysis. I'm guided by a couple of examples that I might as well explain here.

( bell hooks )

( James Gee )

And what am I actually writing about? Here's an overview:

I'm interested in vids in three academic capacities: as a teacher and scholar of writing, as a rhetorical theorist, and as a narrative theorist. I'm fascinated by vidding partly because of the ways it is both like and unlike writing, and especially unlike the school-writing that composition scholars often study. Vidding is something that vidders do voluntarily, and on which they often expend quite extraordinary amounts of time and thought, and in this sense, despite being amateurs, vidders are much more like professional writers than like student writers. A vid is "a visual essay that stages an argument," as Francesca Coppa puts it, but it's also a very specific kind of narrative, a narrative that responds to and transforms other narratives. One of the many things I love about vids is that they're both of those things at the same time, which is a possibility that most theories either of rhetoric or of narrative fail to account for.

I'm also interested in the vidding community's collective insightfulness about making and watching vids; many vidders write extensively about vidding, either in posts of their own or in comments to other people's posts. There has been quite a lot of homegrown theorizing (about the creative process, about genre, about audience) that I think has the potential to illuminate academic conversations about the processes of composing and revising, about giving and responding to feedback on works-in-progress, about developing the authority needed to enter an academic conversation--or, in this case, to talk back to TV.

I'm interested in using academic theories to illuminate aspects of vidding, but, like Gee, I'm also interested in the relationship the other way around: What can scholars in narratology and rhetoric and composition learn from the processes and strategies of vidders? How do vids and vidders complicate existing theories?

I think that's it for now; I'll write more about my specific areas of interest in future posts.