#Casey Fiesler

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Hello TBSkyen, I have a question for you. I myself am a person who's interested in making videos about art and posting them on youtube but have heard pretty much every youtuber I watch complain about youtube's unfair copyright system. So I would like to ask, how do you typically deal with that? What do I need to do to decrease the chance of a video getting claimed/struck? I know you don't have all the answers but I would like to hear the opinion of someone who has had to deal with this.

*deep breath born from long history of frustration*

Okay, so number one, you can't protect yourself fully from that. Anyone can file a copyright claim on anything you upload for any reason, they don't have to have evidence that they own the work being claimed, and all of the onus is on you to prove you didn't commit infringement by disputing the claims being made.

Which sucks.

It's a very frustrating thing to deal with, and it can make it nearly impossible to discuss certain properties or media because the owners (or a bunch of shitty grifters abusing the copyright system) will strike and claim anything and everything they can possibly identify.

Having said that, there are some tips and tricks. First, understand the principle of Fair Use (which is American law, and which is usually what you have to deal with on YouTube, but not always), which Casey Fiesler has a good video primer about here:

The broad strokes are that you can use as much as is needed to make a transformative point and then no more than that. The spirit of the law is that you can't use Fair Use to simply repost and profit off of other people's work, and the reality of how it's enforced is that bots scan YouTube for instances of videos using Too Much of the media they're protecting, and claim it as infringement.

So. If you're discussing any kind of video media - film, TV, animation, etc. - use clips of no more than 5-8 seconds of continuous footage, and do not use the original audio of the show unless it is necessary. You can sometimes get away with longer stretches of footage, but anything over 10 seconds is just begging for an automated copyright claim.

Shrink the footage down on screen and put a frame around it so it doesn't take up the entire screen, edit something on top of the footage like animations and other edits that transform the footage, maybe slow the footage down to a lower speed so that your video can't be construed as a meaningful replacement for watching the original media.

If you're discussing static art - comics, paintings, etc. - make sure to double check the copyright status on them, and keep in mind the principle of using what is needed to make a point and no more than that. If you discuss a manga or comic, be careful about simply showing whole pages unaltered on screen if it's not necessary. Show the panels or dialogue as you discuss it, but don't put whole pages or issues or chapters up on screen in sequence.

There are other tips and tricks and guidelines and hacks also, but if you're discussing any popular form of media you do have to be ready to have to fight a ton of spurious copyright claims on anything you do, especially if it gets views and becomes popular. It's a long process of filing disputes and waiting 30 days for them to get dropped before you can publish your video, it sucks.

[mpchev]

You like reading fanfics? How about reading about fanfics? 😏

Here’s what I've read so far (or am currently getting through) for my dissertation on fanfiction bookbinding! I'll be updating it as I go until the end of July. If you have any recs to add to the towering pile or any questions/opinions about something on there, I’m all ears!

on fan studies & ficbinding ✔

Alexander, Julia, ‘Making fanfiction beautiful enough for a bookshelf’, The Verge, 9 March 2021 <https://www.theverge.com/22311788/fanfiction-bookbinding-tiktok-diy-star-wars-harry-potter-twitter-fandom> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Buchsbaum, Shira Belén, ‘Binding fan fiction and reexamining book production models’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 37 (2022)

Dym, Brianna, and Casey Fiesler, ‘Ethical and privacy considerations for research using online fandom data’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 33 (2020)

Jenkins, Henry, Textual Pochers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routeledge, 1992)

Jenkins, Henry, ‘Transmedia Storytelling 101’, Pop Junctions, 21 March 2007 <http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html#sthash.gSETwxQX.dpuf> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Hellekson, Karen, ‘Making Use Of: The Gift, Commerce, and Fans’, Cinema Journal, 54, no. 3 (2015), 125–131

Kennedy, Kimberly, ‘Fan binding as a method of fan work preservation’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 37 (2022)

Minkel, Elizabeth, ‘Before “Fans,” There Were “Kranks,” “Longhairs,” and “Lions”: How Do Fandom Gain Their Names?’, Atlas Obscura, 30 May 2024 <https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fandom-names> [accessed 12 June 2024]

Penley, Constance, Nasa / Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997)

Price, Ludi, ‘Fanfiction, Self-Publishing, and the Materiality of the Book: A Fan Writer’s Autoethnography’, Humanities, 11, no. 100 (2022), 1–20

Schiller, Melanie, ‘Transmedia Storytelling: New Practices and Audiences’, in Stories: Screen Narrative in the Digital Era, ed. by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 99–107

on folklore, the internet, other background reading ✔

Barthes, Roland, ‘La mort de l’auteur’ in Le Bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984)

Blank, Trevor J., Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2009)

Mauss, Marcel, ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.’, L’année sociologique, 1923–1924; digital edition by Jean-Marie Tremblay, Les classiques des sciences sociales, 17 February 2002, <http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/2_essai_sur_le_don/essai_sur_le_don.html> [accessed 10 June 2024]

McCulloch, Gretchen, Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing (Random House, 2019)

Niles, John D., Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1999)

hopefully coming up next (haven't started yet)

A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. by Paul Booth (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2018)

A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, ed. by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021)

Dietz, Laura, ‘Showing the scars: A short case study of de-enhancement of hypertext works for circulation via fan binding or Kindle Direct Publishing’, 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ‘23), September 4–8, 2023, Rome Italy (ACM: New York, 2023)

Fathallah, Judith May, Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017)

Finn, Kavita Mudan, and Jessica McCall, ‘Exit, pursued by a fan: Shakespeare, Fandom, and the Lure of the Alternate Universe’, Critical Survey, 28, no. 2 (2016), 27–38

Hjorth, Larissa et al., eds. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017)

Jacobs, Naomi, and JSA Lowe, ‘The Design of Printed Fanfiction: A Case Study of Down to Agincourt Fanbinding’, Proceedings from the Document Academy, 9, issue 1, article 5

Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006)

Jenkins, Henry, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning In A Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013)

Kennedy, Kimberly, and Shira Buchsbaum, ‘Reframing Monetization: Compensatory Practices and Generating a Hybrid Economy in Fanbinding Commissions’, Humanities, 11, no. 67 (2022), 1–18

Kirby, Abby, ‘Examining Collaborative Fanfiction: New Practices in Hyperdiegesis and Poaching’, Humanities, 11, no. 87 (2002), 1–9

Kustritz, Anne, Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction (New Work: Routeledge, 2024)

Lamerichs, Nicolle, Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affecive Reception in Fan Cultures, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Universtiy Press, 2018)

Popova, Milena, ‘Follow the trope: A digital (auto)ethnography for fan studies’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 33 (2020)

Rosenblatt, Betsy, and Rebecca Tushnet, ‘Transformative Works: Young Women’s Voices on Fandom and Fair Use’, in eGirls, eCitizens: Putting Technology, Theory and Policy into Dialogue with Girls’ and Young Women’s Voices, ed. by Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves

Soller, Bettina, ‘Filing off the Serial Numbers: Fanfiction and its Adaptation to the Book Market’, in Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. by Johannes Fehrle, Werner Schäfke-Zell (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 58–85

[cfiesler]

New research alert! Research about research, actually!

A couple of years ago we recruited here (and elsewhere) for interview participants for a research study about fat people's experiences online. As part of that study we also asked for thoughts about how to ethically conduct such research, both in online communities and in human-computer interaction research more generally. This short paper was presented as a poster at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. Led by PhD student Blakeley Payne, this also won the conference's Best Poster Recognition! <3

"How to Ethically Engage Fat People in Research"

(1) Choose respectful language. Use participants' own self description in conversation and reporting. Consider the connotations of euphemisms and medicalizing language. We recommend "fat" as a default term to use until participants or the context indicates otherwise.

(2) Consider positionality and practice reflexivity. Fat people are not a monolith but are experts in their own lived experiences. Engage with the history of fat oppression, especially as facilitated by research and medical institutions. Consider your positionality with respect to this history.

(3) Rethink assumptions around weight loss. Don't assume fat people are unhealthy and/or want to lose weight. Interrogate "weight loss" as an embedded design value and its potential for harm. Use notions of health that are weight-neutral such as Health at Every Size.

(4) Engage fat people in research. Fat people want to be engaged in technology design and research! Center fat people's voices, needs, and desires when choosing research questions and methods.

Citation and (open access!) link to full paper: Blakeley H. Payne, Jordan Taylor, Katta Spiel, and Casey Fiesler. 2023. How to Ethically Engage Fat People in HCI Research. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 117–121. https://doi.org/10.1145/3584931.3606987

[scifigeneration]

AI is here – and everywhere: 3 AI researchers look to the challenges ahead in 2024

by Anjana Susarla, Professor of Information Systems at Michigan State University, Casey Fiesler, Associate Professor of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Kentaro Toyama Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan

2023 was an inflection point in the evolution of artificial intelligence and its role in society. The year saw the emergence of generative AI, which moved the technology from the shadows to center stage in the public imagination. It also saw boardroom drama in an AI startup dominate the news cycle for several days. And it saw the Biden administration issue an executive order and the European Union pass a law aimed at regulating AI, moves perhaps best described as attempting to bridle a horse that’s already galloping along.

We’ve assembled a panel of AI scholars to look ahead to 2024 and describe the issues AI developers, regulators and everyday people are likely to face, and to give their hopes and recommendations.

Casey Fiesler, Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder

2023 was the year of AI hype. Regardless of whether the narrative was that AI was going to save the world or destroy it, it often felt as if visions of what AI might be someday overwhelmed the current reality. And though I think that anticipating future harms is a critical component of overcoming ethical debt in tech, getting too swept up in the hype risks creating a vision of AI that seems more like magic than a technology that can still be shaped by explicit choices. But taking control requires a better understanding of that technology.

One of the major AI debates of 2023 was around the role of ChatGPT and similar chatbots in education. This time last year, most relevant headlines focused on how students might use it to cheat and how educators were scrambling to keep them from doing so – in ways that often do more harm than good.

However, as the year went on, there was a recognition that a failure to teach students about AI might put them at a disadvantage, and many schools rescinded their bans. I don’t think we should be revamping education to put AI at the center of everything, but if students don’t learn about how AI works, they won’t understand its limitations – and therefore how it is useful and appropriate to use and how it’s not. This isn’t just true for students. The more people understand how AI works, the more empowered they are to use it and to critique it.

So my prediction, or perhaps my hope, for 2024 is that there will be a huge push to learn. In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the ELIZA chatbot, wrote that machines are “often sufficient to dazzle even the most experienced observer,” but that once their “inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away.” The challenge with generative artificial intelligence is that, in contrast to ELIZA’s very basic pattern matching and substitution methodology, it is much more difficult to find language “sufficiently plain” to make the AI magic crumble away.

I think it’s possible to make this happen. I hope that universities that are rushing to hire more technical AI experts put just as much effort into hiring AI ethicists. I hope that media outlets help cut through the hype. I hope that everyone reflects on their own uses of this technology and its consequences. And I hope that tech companies listen to informed critiques in considering what choices continue to shape the future.

Kentaro Toyama, Professor of Community Information, University of Michigan

In 1970, Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer and neural network skeptic, told Life magazine, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” With the singularity, the moment artificial intelligence matches and begins to exceed human intelligence – not quite here yet – it’s safe to say that Minsky was off by at least a factor of 10. It’s perilous to make predictions about AI.

Still, making predictions for a year out doesn’t seem quite as risky. What can be expected of AI in 2024? First, the race is on! Progress in AI had been steady since the days of Minsky’s prime, but the public release of ChatGPT in 2022 kicked off an all-out competition for profit, glory and global supremacy. Expect more powerful AI, in addition to a flood of new AI applications.

The big technical question is how soon and how thoroughly AI engineers can address the current Achilles’ heel of deep learning – what might be called generalized hard reasoning, things like deductive logic. Will quick tweaks to existing neural-net algorithms be sufficient, or will it require a fundamentally different approach, as neuroscientist Gary Marcus suggests? Armies of AI scientists are working on this problem, so I expect some headway in 2024.

Meanwhile, new AI applications are likely to result in new problems, too. You might soon start hearing about AI chatbots and assistants talking to each other, having entire conversations on your behalf but behind your back. Some of it will go haywire – comically, tragically or both. Deepfakes, AI-generated images and videos that are difficult to detect are likely to run rampant despite nascent regulation, causing more sleazy harm to individuals and democracies everywhere. And there are likely to be new classes of AI calamities that wouldn’t have been possible even five years ago.

Speaking of problems, the very people sounding the loudest alarms about AI – like Elon Musk and Sam Altman – can’t seem to stop themselves from building ever more powerful AI. I expect them to keep doing more of the same. They’re like arsonists calling in the blaze they stoked themselves, begging the authorities to restrain them. And along those lines, what I most hope for 2024 – though it seems slow in coming – is stronger AI regulation, at national and international levels.

Anjana Susarla, Professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University

In the year since the unveiling of ChatGPT, the development of generative AI models is continuing at a dizzying pace. In contrast to ChatGPT a year back, which took in textual prompts as inputs and produced textual output, the new class of generative AI models are trained to be multi-modal, meaning the data used to train them comes not only from textual sources such as Wikipedia and Reddit, but also from videos on YouTube, songs on Spotify, and other audio and visual information. With the new generation of multi-modal large language models (LLMs) powering these applications, you can use text inputs to generate not only images and text but also audio and video.

Companies are racing to develop LLMs that can be deployed on a variety of hardware and in a variety of applications, including running an LLM on your smartphone. The emergence of these lightweight LLMs and open source LLMs could usher in a world of autonomous AI agents – a world that society is not necessarily prepared for.

These advanced AI capabilities offer immense transformative power in applications ranging from business to precision medicine. My chief concern is that such advanced capabilities will pose new challenges for distinguishing between human-generated content and AI-generated content, as well as pose new types of algorithmic harms.

The deluge of synthetic content produced by generative AI could unleash a world where malicious people and institutions can manufacture synthetic identities and orchestrate large-scale misinformation. A flood of AI-generated content primed to exploit algorithmic filters and recommendation engines could soon overpower critical functions such as information verification, information literacy and serendipity provided by search engines, social media platforms and digital services.

The Federal Trade Commission has warned about fraud, deception, infringements on privacy and other unfair practices enabled by the ease of AI-assisted content creation. While digital platforms such as YouTube have instituted policy guidelines for disclosure of AI-generated content, there’s a need for greater scrutiny of algorithmic harms from agencies like the FTC and lawmakers working on privacy protections such as the American Data Privacy & Protection Act.

A new bipartisan bill introduced in Congress aims to codify algorithmic literacy as a key part of digital literacy. With AI increasingly intertwined with everything people do, it is clear that the time has come to focus not on algorithms as pieces of technology but to consider the contexts the algorithms operate in: people, processes and society.

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: technology platforms & AI

The Limitations of ChatGPT with Emily Bender and Casey Fiesler

The Radical AI podcast (March 2023)

In this episode, we unpack the limitations of ChatGPT. We interview Dr. Emily M. Bender and Dr. Casey Fiesler about the ethical considerations of ChatGPT, bias and discrimination, and the importance of algorithmic literacy in the face of chatbots.

Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has been on the faculty since 2003. Her research interests include multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, and the societal impacts of language technology. Emily was also recently nominated as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Casey Fiesler is an associate professor in Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. She researches and teaches in the areas of technology ethics, internet law and policy, and online communities. Also a public scholar, she is a frequent commentator and speaker on topics of technology ethics and policy, and her research has been covered everywhere from The New York Times to Teen Vogue.

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? by Ted Chiang (The New Yorker, May 2023)

People who criticize new technologies are sometimes called Luddites, but it’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine’s owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners’ attention.

Whenever anyone accuses anyone else of being a Luddite, it’s worth asking, is the person being accused actually against technology? Or are they in favor of economic justice? And is the person making the accusation actually in favor of improving people’s lives? Or are they just trying to increase the private accumulation of capital?

In 1980, it was common to support a family on a single income; now it’s rare. So, how much progress have we really made in the past forty years? Sure, shopping online is fast and easy, and streaming movies at home is cool, but I think a lot of people would willingly trade those conveniences for the ability to own their own homes, send their kids to college without running up lifelong debt, and go to the hospital without falling into bankruptcy. It’s not technology’s fault that the median income hasn’t kept pace with per-capita G.D.P.; it’s mostly the fault of Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. But some responsibility also falls on the management policies of C.E.O.s like Jack Welch, who ran General Electric between 1981 and 2001, as well as on consulting firms like McKinsey. I’m not blaming the personal computer for the rise in wealth inequality—I’m just saying that the claim that better technology will necessarily improve people’s standard of living is no longer credible.

[Image shows Stable Diffusion generated images for “Committed Janitor”]

Researchers Find Stable Diffusion Amplifies Stereotypes by Justin Hendrix (Tech Policy, Nov 2022)

Sasha Luccioni, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at Hugging Face, a company that develops AI tools, recently released a project she calls the Stable Diffusion Explorer. With a menu of inputs, a user can compare how different professions are represented by Stable Diffusion, and how variables such as adjectives may alter image outputs. An “assertive firefighter,” for instance, is depicted as white male. A “committed janitor” is a person of color.

A talk: How To Find Things Online by v buckenham (May 2023)

And the other way to look at this, really, is not about AI at all, but seeing this as the continuation of a gradual corporate incursion into the early spirit of sharing that characterised the internet. I say incursion but maybe the better word is enclosure, as in enclosure of the commons. And this positions AI as just a new method by which companies try to extract value from the things people share freely, and capture that value for themselves. And maybe the way back from this is being more intentional about building our communities in ways where the communities own them. GameFAQs was created to collate some useful stuff together for a community, and it ended up as part of a complicated chain of corporate mergers and acquisitions. But other communities experienced the kinds of upheaval that came with that, and then decided to create their own sites which can endure outside of that - I’m thinking here especially of Archive of Our Own, the biggest repository for fan-writing online. And incidentally, the source of 8.2 million words in that AI training set, larger even than Reddit.

The technologies of all dead generations by Ben Tarnoff  (Apr 2023)

The three waves of algorithmic accountability

First wave: Harm reduction

Second wave: Abolition

Third wave: Alternatives

The third wave of algorithmic accountability, then, is already in motion. It’s a welcome development, and one that I wholeheartedly support.

But I’m also wary of it. There is a sense of relief when one moves from critique to creation. It satisfies the familiar American impulse to be practical, constructive, solution-oriented. And this introduces a danger, which is that in the comfort we derive from finally doing something rather than just talking and writing and analyzing and arguing, we get too comfortable, and act without an adequate understanding of the difficulties that condition and constrain our activity.

Platforms don't exist by Ben Tarnoff (Nov 2019)

By contrast, a left tech policy should aim to make markets mediate less of our lives—to make them less central to our survival and flourishing. This is typically referred to as decommodification, and it’s closely related to another core principle, democratization. Capitalism is driven by continuous accumulation, and continuous accumulation requires the commodification of as many things and activities as possible. Decommodification tries to roll this process back, by taking certain things and activities off the market. This lets us do two things: 1. The first is to give everybody the resources (material and otherwise) that they need to survive and to flourish—as a matter of right, not as a commodity. People get what they need, not just what they can afford. 2. The second is to give everybody the power to participate in the decisions that most affect them.

[yukilim0301]

Digital citizenship & Conflict: Social Media Governance

Week 7

Digital citizenship is defined as an experience that suggests the proper and smart use of technology and online platforms (Digital citizenship: teens being responsible online, 2023). With the growing role played by social media in our everyday activities, it is critically important to observe digital citizenship. However, the scourge of conflicts in the digital realm abounds with cyber harassment posing as the major hazard. 

Cyberbullying, trolling, hate speech, stalking and more. These are only several forms of online harassment that can influence victims in a terrible way, like emotional distress, social isolation, or even physical harm (Arlin Cuncic, 2023). 

The social media become the source of online harassment and so they introduce different governance measures to solve the issue (Pater, 2026). These practices are usually provisioned with moderation tools and regulations like community guidelines and reporting systems, and in some cases, the legal system is involved. 

To illustrate, let's pick an issue of online harassment on social media such as Twitter. The user that is target of the abusive messages or threats through another user can report such account to the platform, if they feel interfered. The governing team, then, will assess the report send and may bring about the necessary action such as suspending or banning the offensive account. 

Besides, social media systems might apply AI and machine learning algorithms to identify and remove offensive contents through a smart system (Artificial intelligence, toward new horizons in the fight against gender-based violence, n.d.). By use of these algorithms a victim can be protected from having abusive behaviour to take place by the use of algorithms that can identify patterns of abusive behaviour and then remove the offending content from appearing. 

Hence social media governance attempts to enforce civility and empathy promoting the safe online environment by the implementation of content standards (YUSOF, 2024) and ban of those who contribute to online abuses. 

References:

Artificial intelligence, toward new horizons in the fight against gender-based violence. (n.d.). INFOSEGURA. https://infosegura.org/en/blogs/artificial-intelligence-toward-new-horizons-fight-against-gender-based-violence

Cuncic, A. (2022, February 19). The Psychology of Cyberbullying. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/the-psychology-of-cyberbullying-5086615

Jessica A Pater. (2016). Characterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms (Casey Fiesler, Ed.) [Review of Characterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms]. Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317012226_Characterizations_of_Online_Harassment_Comparing_Policies_Across_Social_Media_Platforms

Keeping our children safe online. (n.d.). The Star. Retrieved May 10, 2024, from https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2024/02/06/keeping-our-children-safe-online

‌Raising Children. (2018, December 20). Digital citizenship: teens being responsible online. Raising Children Network. https://raisingchildren.net.au/pre-teens/entertainment-technology/digital-life/digital-citizenship

‌

[fanwork-ethnography]

reading list and resources

a non-comprehensive list of texts, both scholarly and otherwise, that i referred to or encountered in the course of my research. some i found helpful, others less so; i’ve compiled them all below for other researchers and curious fans with a variety investments to read more about the topic. this is not an endorsement of any of the below texts. 

if you have any edits, additions, or questions about this list, my askbox is always open! if you run into any paywalls or need institutional access, especially for the academic articles at the bottom, message me and i’d be happy to send you a pdf. 

a 7-minute introduction to the Organization for Transformative Works: https://youtu.be/PNd2YzVeGZE

the OTW website: https://www.transformativeworks.org/

“a brief history of ao3″ by Marinel (on fanfic as a labor of love, as rebellion, as representation, and as community)

“Fan fiction has been around longer than you think” (archived web page)

the ao3 github: https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive

“the plight of the former fanfiction author” by casey fiesler (on the tension between privacy and access, our right to be forgotten and our right to have stories––this was one of my favorite readings

academic articles:

Black, Rebecca W. “Online Fan Fiction, Global Identities, and Imagination.” Research in the Teaching of English 43, no. 4 (2009): 397–425. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27784341.

Busse, Kristina. “Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love.” Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (2015): 110–15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43653438.

Collins, Jim. “Reading, in a Digital Archive of One’s Own.” PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 207–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23489279. 

title does not refer to AO3; however i found this article to be really helpful in thinking about what the emergence of digital culture and a “media ecology” means for the reading experience

De Kosnik, Abigail. “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 118–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25619734.

De Kosnik, Abigail. “Memory, Archive, and History in Political Fan Fiction.” In Fandom, Second Edition: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 270–84. NYU Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwtbq2.19.

Fiesler, Casey, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman. “An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design.” CHI’16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 07-12, 2016. https://cfiesler.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/chi2016_ao3_fiesler.pdf.

Lothian, Alexis. “Sex, Utopia, and the Queer Temporalities of Fannish Love.” In Fandom, Second Edition: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 238–52. NYU Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwtbq2.17.

Rosenblatt, Betsy, and Rebecca Tushnet. “Transformative Works: Young Women’s Voices on Fandom and Fair Use.” In EGirls, ECitizens: Putting Technology, Theory and Policy into Dialogue with Girls’ and Young Women’s Voices, edited by Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves, 385–410. University of Ottawa Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmj7f.19.

[sbooksbowm]

Weekly Wrap-Up - 2 October

Look who is procrastinating editing the bookbinders chapter! This kid. The main body is written, but I’m trying to work in some theoretical background in the introduction to do the academicky-thing of nodding to the other writers who have laid the groundwork for this kind of research. I’m speed-reading Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books and trying to scrounge together some information on Jessica Pressman’s forthcoming Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age, both of which foreground a lot of the points I make about the tensions between digital and print forms of texts. 

New Approach to the Weekly Wrap-Ups!

I’m only 2.5 weeks out from turning in this dissertation, so as I move away from giving regular updates about my research, I’m going to change the form of the weekly format to compile all of the things I posted about, recommend, and am thinking about in one place. That way, if you’re ever wondering ‘what is sbooks up to?’, you can go to my research masterpost and click on my weekly wrap-ups to get quick access to fun links and lukewarm takes.

Things I posted about

Casey Fiesler’s (@cfiesler) awesome video about fan migration, the oral explanation of her most recent article with Brianna Dym. This is totally worth the 30-minute watch, and Fiesler does an amazing job of tracking the history of fannish media alongside the impetuses of fan migration

a reflection on why fans are the most likely to think critically and expansively about the media they consume, in response to the criticism that fans are content with just consuming the same story over and over again (which is true, but not without reason)

Things I recommend 

Riley J. Dennis’s Case for the Legend of Korra, which is an excellent elaboration on some popular pro-Korra arguments against the naysayers of the sequel series. I love that Riley talks about Korra’s journey towards humanization via healing from trauma, which is something I think many viewers feel affirmed by.  

Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s 'The Sound of Someone You Love Who’s Going Away and It Doesn’t Matter’. What a title! And it really does sound like it.

Things I’ve been thinking about

Takeaways on writing: This has been a week of revisions, with some serious cutting and clarifying. My advisor pointed out that as I am a newbie academic writer, I still rely a lot on quotations instead of paraphrasing my sources for support, rather than evidence. Rephrasing a lot of quotations opened up a lot of room for my own argument. This process made me think a lot about writing guidance in middle school and high school, wherein I was trained to use quotations as evidence rather than as support. Anyone else learn this? That the more people who agree with you, the more right your argument is, instead of drawing from original or revisiting primary evidence and using previous writing as a framework for analysis? It’s a pretty bad habit! And it makes us reliant on regurgitating other work rather than working through our own arguments and examining how they align or disalign with others. Graduate school has been one long re-learning process on writing...and I studied writing in uni. 

Different kinds of fan spaces: I hang out, actively participate, and lurk in a variety of fan spaces, mostly in the form of Discord servers (my love) and Facebook groups (bane of my existence). And I’m in a lot of fan spaces for different media: TV shows, books, comics, podcasts, even fan platforms. Though this has been said elsewhere, the difference in attitude and behavior of fans depending on the type of space (and whether fans are masked by a pseudonym or not) is fascinating to me! I’m in one enormous Facebook group dedicated to television show, and without fail, every single post ends up with the comments off because the discourse gets too heated. This behavior is almost definitely a function of:

the impersonal size of the group. In my favorite Discord servers, the smaller size makes the conversation more personable and friendlier (I know these people! I’m not going to harangue them!), and,  

affirmational versus transformational fandom: affirmational fans tend to work within the confines of canon, and so when they disagree over the interpretation of canonical elements, the conversation turns to facts (’no, this is how it happened in season 12, episode 472’) over feelings (’this happened once in the spin-off comic and I’m cool w extrapolating this bc I wanna feel warm and fuzzy inside’). Transformational fans are less canon-restricted and perhaps more lenient, and are probably more likely to silo themselves in fan spaces with agreed-upon interpretations (e.g. I’m in a few dedicated shipping servers, and I know other shipping servers exist, but I won’t bother myself with them, because that’s not my cup of tea, so I’ll just save myself the trouble). 

This isn’t to say that affirmational fans won’t break off from the main group and form their own interpretive communities, but I think affirmational fans are more likely to want to be a part of the “official” fan spaces, because they are interested in the “official” story. 

This is anecdotal conjecture, but I wonder, have you seen differences in fan behavior depending on the fannish space you’re in? I’d love to hear about other fan-space-specific experiences!

[fansplaining]

One of the things that I found when I interviewed developers of AO3 was that a number of them actually learned to code by working on the Archive.... sometimes people would start out as code testers or tag wranglers, and then learn more, and eventually work on the development of the Archive. Which was particularly striking because, again, it's mostly women, and I thought it was this great example of a way to broaden participation in computing: get people who love a thing so much they want to help the thing and they’re willing to pick up technical skills in order to do that.

@cfiesler on episode 91 of Fansplaining

[rovermcfly]

Media Literacy Masterpost

This post is constantly evolving. You can help by sharing resources you know, pointing out broken links or even expressing criticism of the resources provided here if you have any. Come back any time to see if there's anything new. (Google Docs version for easier sharing outside tumblr)

Updated: September 14th 2023

The Basics

Get answers to the first questions you might have: What is media literacy? Why should I care? How does it affect me and others? Is there even anything I can still learn if I feel pretty internet-savvy? And more.

Websites

Get a more in-depth look at certain aspects of media literacy and learn about and apply media literacy skills. (alphabetical order)

Casey Fiesler

Check Your Fact

The Conspiracy Chart

Harvard Misinformation Review

InVid

The Media Bias Chart

Media Literacy Now

MediaSmarts

MediaWise (by Poynter)

National Association for Media Literacy Education

News Literacy Project

Poynter

Reuters Fact Check

SourceWatch

Truth Decay Project Tools Database* (A lot of websites that are relevant are listed here. Only websites that aren't on that list will be listed in this post)

Articles

See what experts have to say.

Interactive Learning Tools

This can help you learn about media literacy in a more hands-on way. (alphabetical order)

Critical Thinking Project

Go Viral! (Covid Misinformation)

News Lit Quiz

Truth Decay Project Education/Training Tools* (A lot of interactive tools that are relevant are listed here. Only websites and tools that aren't on that list will be listed in this post)

Social Media

Following these accounts can help sharpen your media literacy skills and you don't even have to do much because it will just pop up in your feeds! Follow, like, comment, retweet, etc. to help spread the word. (alphabetical order)

Instagram

Media Literacy Now

MediaWise

PolitiFact

TikTok

Abbie Richards

Adam Conover

Aslan Pahari

Astro Alexandra

babs_zone

Hank Green

MediaWise

PolitiFact

Professor Casey

Zeke Darwin

Tumblr

@is-the-post-reliable

Twitter

I have personally left twitter due to its new ownership, so it will be difficult for me to keep vetting the listed accounts the way I used to, however I will keep them listed as long as I still trust them.

Abbie Richards

AFP Fact Check

Fact-Checking Network

Media Literacy Now

MediaWise

National Association for Media Literacy Education

PolitiFact

Reuters Fact Check

YouTube

MediaSmarts

MediaWise

PolitiFact

Bonus

My media literacy tag

Remember to share these resources to help shape a world wide web that is safer and smarter and protect yourself and others from manipulation and radicalization.

* Criticism of this source has been expressed. I've provided my reasoning to still include it as well. I encourage you to make your own judgement.

[Image ID in alt]

(I could since then not find an obvious bias in the lists that I have linked)

Information on the history of the RAND Corporation and its involvement with the US Military here.

[transformativeworks]

OTW Signal, August 2021

This month's OTW Signal features a post by OTW Legal Staffer Casey Fiesler, as well as a look at vidders + a survey participation request, and tips for you on gift exchanges and video embedding at AO3.  Read more at https://otw.news/otw-signal-747a44

[toastystats]

I’m curious about your methods of collecting and analysis data. I love looking at the numbers on ao3 (messing with the filters to see how stuff correlates) but beyond that I’m clueless with statistics. I really like the stuff you do and want to do my own research but I’m gay and bad at math, any tips?

Aww, nonny, thanks for asking this lovely question! (And for cracking me up & teaching me the “gay and bad at math” meme :D )  A lot of what I do doesn’t actually involve math or stats.  It’s mostly a matter of looking up some numbers using AO3 tools that anyone can use, like AO3 Work Search, the AO3 fandom browsing lists or AO3 tag browsing list, and/or the Sort & Filter sidebar for any AO3 tag -- which it sounds like you already do sometimes!  I then copy those numbers from AO3 into a spreadsheet (I use Google Sheets), and I use the spreadsheet’s built in graph-making tools.  And I have used some similar methods to find out about Fanfiction.net and other platforms.  There are more complicated things I’ve done at times, too (e.g., I wrote some programs to gather some of those numbers more quickly for me), but you don’t need any special background or fancy tools to do most of the things I do.

Anyway!  I can go through some examples of how to gather the kinds of data that I use, without requiring any math/stats/programming skills -- hopefully that will help you and any of my other readers who are interested to do similar stuff without getting intimidated.  I’ve started by posting a tutorial on AO3 about how to gather fandom data and do fandom stats.  The first chapter covers how to find the biggest fandoms on AO3, but there are plenty of other topics I could cover.  So if you or any of my readers have specific questions, or votes about any of these potential topics, please let me know!

What are the biggest fandoms on AO3?  Or on Fanfiction.net, etc?

What are the biggest ships overall?  (Or the biggest femslash ships, or other specialized ships)

What are the most common tropes or tags?

Which fandoms/ships/tags get the most kudos or comments? 

How can you analyze a particular fandom/ship/tag?

How has a particular fandom/ship/tag changed over time? 

How can you compare the same fandom or ship across different fannish platforms (AO3, Fanfiction.net, Wattpad, Tumblr, etc)?

Sidenote #1: You might not actually be bad at math/stats!  These subjects are unfortunately often taught very poorly.  I got bad grades in some of my math and stats classes that were extremely hard to follow and very abstract.  I figured out how to do some of the same stuff later, once I had some concrete questions that I wanted to answer (e.g., about fandom).

Sidenote #2: Even if you don’t want to do math or stats, you can still study fandom.  For fun or even academically -- e.g., the awesome fandom research done by Casey Fiesler’s Internet Rules Lab doesn’t involve much math ( @cfiesler said I could tell you that :) ).

[epiitaphs]

there’s nothing like that particular cringe you do when you have to read about like ffnet, youtube, ao3, da, etc in an academic paper

im not saying research on online creative communities is a bad thing. it’s just weird seeing it from the outside

writing this paper is weird bc its it’s a weird balance of ‘haha i totally haven’t done any of these things’ and ‘i have knowledge of certain things that is perhaps dangerously in-depth’

[tracing-ao3]

Fanfiction’s Biggest Platform Wasn’t Built in a Day: The History of Archive of Our Own

Hey! What do you know about fandoms and fan works? Chances are that the answer is a lot. People here on Tumblr are rarely strangers to fandom and that’s pretty much what this social media platform is used for. Fandom has become a big part of the human experience, and there are loads of places both online and in person to get excited about the media that interests you. From stan twitter to the Dashcon ball pit, there are plenty of ways we share fan experiences.

Most notably are fan works, the art and stories created by fans to extend, “fix,” or build upon the stories from canon. Arguably the most popular method for sharing fan works, specifically fan fiction, is Archive of Our Own. AO3 is popular now, but it is far from the first of its kind. There is a long history of fandom culture and similar technologies that lead to the creation of this platform. More under the cut since things get a little long.

From Humble Fandom Beginnings

First, we have to acknowledge that the first building block to Archive of Our Own was the existence of fandom itself, which existed in different terms long before there were internet platforms to share it on. A Fanbyte article shares some funny perspectives of where fan culture might have started, and it involves Sherlock Holmes (but not that Sherlock). When the Holmes books were originally being published by Arthur Conan Doyle, readers easily became very invested. So much so that there were angry letters and actual protests when the author killed off the title character, so at least we know today’s Sherlock fans come by it honestly.

It may not have been called fandom back in Doyle’s day, but consumers have been highly dedicated to the media they consume for some time now. However, if a modern fan is unhappy with a decision to kill off a character or any other looked down upon plot decision, there may be a different place for them to turn aside from protests.

What the Fanfiction?

Moving on from the 1800s but still before the rise of the net, the fandom landscape was about to be shifted. Popular sci-fi series Stark Trek had its fair share of dedicated fans. Together a group of fans would help in the movement to popularize fan fiction. A zine called Spockanalia was published in 1968 and was comprised entirely of fan work, responses to the show, and, yes, fan fiction.

Prior to widespread internet access, fic was distributed in similar zines, at conventions, or even passed among students in schools.

This zine was probably not the first example of what we think of fan fiction, but it sure did help shift the landscape and make way for the digital versions of platform to come.

Fan Fiction Takes the Web

With the existence of the internet increasing people’s ability to share their content, it’s no surprise fandom found a new place to thrive. Fans were now posting content online, but we were still a long way from the platforms we have now.

Tech savvy fans developed online spaces for their specific fandom or even a certain ship. This became the storage place for fic and true hubs for fandom activity. These designs are a little outdated, but they represent a blueprint for later fic hosting sites.

Images from Vice’s “The Forgotten Early History of Fanfiction”

In October of 1998, we see FanFiction.net pop up. This site serves as a true predecessor to AO3. FF.net was one of the first sites dedicated to fanfiction that housed multiple fandoms, not just one specific fandom per message board. This platform received a lot of attention from fans and writers for its unique offerings and ability to read from multiple categories in one place. Despite the popularity of FanFiction.net, the site had its own host of problems that would come to fruition in the coming years.

Censorship and Greed (Come Before the Fall)

FanFiction.net offered a service that fans were looking for, but it was somewhat restrictive in the content it allowed. This included the array of content rating, bans on sexually explicit content, etc. Additionally, there is no fic to be posted by authors who have voiced their criticism of fan fiction.

Casey Fiesler, a professor in information science, also has a fantastic video on the rise and death of various fandom platforms, which discusses some additional predecessors to AO3 and the issues that arose from them.

For example, LiveJournal was being used as a platform for fan content creators to post work and communicate with other fans. This was effective until a change in LiveJournal’s policy affected the type of content allowed on the site, once again banning sexually explicit works. This policy change resulted in over 500 journals being deleted overnight and without warning. Furthermore, some of these accounts didn’t even host fan fic, and instead were accounts from survivors of sexual assault. LiveJournal clearly made some mistakes in this move, and users were pretty unhappy with the treatment.

In 2007 around the same time as LiveJournal’s purge, a new fic platform was breaking into the scene: FanLib. The creators behind FanLib seemed to notice the growing popularity of fan fiction and aimed to turn a profit off of these works. Naturally, the site faced a lot of criticisms and distain from the community.

With the outrage caused in fandom communities, it was time for a change. Controversy surrounding censorship and profit on existing fan work platforms fed directly into the creation of Archive of Our Own.

By the Fans, For the Fans: Archive of Our Own Sheds Restrictions

As much as AO3 was created in direct response to these aforementioned, it also borrows from their structure. It is a place for all multiple fandoms, much like the bold move on FanFiction.net’s part in the 90s.

While AO3 built off the existing technologies of prior fic hosting sites, it also boasted quite a few differences in regards to the content allowed.

Whereas FF.net restricted what authors fan fiction could be posted for and both it and LiveJournal posed restrictions of erotica, AO3 took the opposite approach. Their policy allowed any and all content to be hosted on their cite, as long as the work tagged the necessary archive warnings (including major character death, rape/non-con, etc.).

More recent years have inspired much debate on this concept. Some advocate for further restrictions that would prevent fics featuring incest, pedophilia, and other illegal and disturbing topics. This viewpoint certainly has merit, but these works do nothing to violate Archive policy as long as the content is indicated within the warning and tags. It is also worth considering that user are able to filter through warnings and tags, excluding ones they don’t want to see.

The other side of this argument points to the long history leading up to the Archive’s creation. Indeed, given that AO3 was developed to combat censorship on similar platforms, the lack of restrictions makes far more sense. There are certainly valid points to be voiced on both side of this debate, but looking to the textual predecessors of AO3 makes it clear why such a policy would be in place.

An additionally difference in AO3’s structure lies in the profit. While FanLib met a premature death due to its desire to profit on the back of content creators, AO3 does no such thing. In fact, it is run by nonprofit group Organization for Transformative Works and the site’s work is done by volunteers.

Archive of Our Own builds upon the conventions of fan work sites while adapting them for its own needs.

Borrowing From Other Social Media Practices

The Archive also demonstrates trends that can be seen across social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and here on Tumblr. The hashtag that is used to sort posts and material online is also utilized on AO3, but in a slightly different fashion.

Tagging on other social media is sometimes ineffective when users include different tags to talk about the same concepts (think one user tagging a post “Doctor Who” while another uses “dw”). This makes it difficult for users to find the content they’re looking for.

To improve upon the tagging system used across social media, AO3 uses a method called tag wrangling. This involves volunteers sorting through new tags that are used and linking them to other tags that mean the same thing. As such, a poster can use whatever tag they are most familiar with, and tag wranglers will make sure it shows up under any tag that has the same meaning. Tag wrangling solves the issue that alienates users from finding content and also ensures that the filtering system is as effective as possible.

Fanfiction’s Biggest Platform Wasn’t Built in a Day

It’s clear that AO3 is far from the first of its kind. The widely used platform built upon the existing structures and uses of similar platforms, structures, and communities.

By building with and improving upon these existing formats, Archive of Our Own has created an online space that utilizes existing technologies in a fresh way that attracts users.

Read more here:

Fanbyte, “From Star Trek to Superwholock: A Brief History of Fanfiction”

Vice, “The Forgotten Early History of Fanfiction”

Wired, “Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online”

Casey Fiesler, “The Life and Death of Fandom Platforms | LiveJournal, Archive of Our Own (AO3), Tumblr, and ???”

The Mary Sue, “The Bad Faith Attacks on Archive of Our Own Have to End”

Additional images from FanFiction.new and archiveofourown.org

[transformativeworksandcultures]

TWC 33: Fan Studies Methodologies

Transformative Works and Cultures, No. 33, Fan Studies Methodologies, edited by Julia E. Largent, Milena Popova, and Elise Vist (June 15, 2020)

Editorial

Julia E. Largent, Milena Popova, and Elise Vist, Toward some fanons of fan studies

Theory

Briony Hannell, Fan studies and/as feminist methodology

Sophie Hansal & Marianne Gunderson, Toward a fannish methodology: Affect as an asset

Milena Popova, Follow the trope: A digital (auto)ethnography for fan studies

Dennis Jansen, Thoughts on an ethical approach to archives in fan studies

Brianna Dym & Casey Fiesler, Ethical and privacy considerations for research using online fandom data

Naomi Jacobs, Interdisciplinary methodologies for the fan studies bricoleur

Christopher Luke Moore, An approach to online fan persona

Suzanne R. Black, Adding a digital dimension to fan studies methodologies

Rukmini Pande, Critique of methodological practices in fan studies

Praxis

Adrienne E. Raw, Rhetorical moves in disclosing fan identity in fandom scholarship

Abby Waysdorf, Placing fandom, studying fans: Modified acafandom in practice

Daisy Pignetti, "She's a fan, but this was supposed to be scientific": Fan misunderstandings and acafan mistakes

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Applying Brenda Dervin's sensemaking methodology to fan studies

Ruth Flaherty, Benefits of quantitative and doctrinal methodological approaches to fan studies research

Lies Lanckman, Fans, community, and conflict in the pages of "Picture Play," 1920–38

Erika Ningxin Wang, Brittany Kelley, Ludi Price, & Kristen Schuster, Beyond the multidisciplinary in fan studies: Learning how to talk among disciplines

Symposium

Mandy Rhae Olejnik & Danielle Hart, Exploring a threshold concept framework to fan studies research methodology

Sarah Elizabeth Ader, Negotiating acafandom as a first-time researcher

Maria Alberto, Fan users and platform studies

Shayla Olsen, Methodological model for fictocritical fan fiction as research

Martine Mussies, Autiethnography

Dawn Walls-Thumma, Diving into the lacuna: Fan studies, methodologies, and mending the gaps

Regina Yung Lee, The affective labor of fan studies: A pedagogical problem in two parts

Milena Popova, Fan studies, citation practices, and fannish knowledge production

Interview

Julia E. Largent, Milena Popova, Elise Vist, Interview with Louisa Ellen Stein: Whole self and felt scholarship in fan studies

Review

Lesley Autumn Willard, "Fans and fan cultures: Tourism, consumerism, and social media," by Henrik Linden and Sara Linden

Balaka Basu, "Fanfiction and the author: How fanfic changes popular cultural texts," by Judith Fathallah