Oh hi blog, no offense, but I do most of my internettery on twitter these days. One of the keys to twitter's wild success has been the capacity of its stripped-down interface to paradoxically inspire a cornucopia of practices driven by the swarming creativity of its users. Although the update box at the top is still captioned "What are you doing?" people type into it any and all information that can be meted out in 140 characters, including reviews, live commentary, poetry, jokes, links, meme responses, calls to action, and messages to friends. The site's open API and ecumenical attitude has facilitated innumerable hacks and mashups that offer workarounds for some of the features that twitter lacks, as well as illuminating and fanciful ways of interfacing with its worldwide cloud of presence.

( twitterfic.com )

IRL: I have little prospect of a job for next year, although I'm still sending out applications and still hoping a fellowship will materialize. Otherwise I'll take it as it comes. I'm not going to starve, which makes me luckier than many people in this economy. My lease is up at the end of May, and I don't know yet where I'll move.

PHD: I'm unlikely to finish my dissertation on time unless I'm offered a contract that requires me to. But it will be done by the fall, one way or another. I'm doing my darndest to get regular posting going again, so watch this space for the next chapter. In the interest of writing, job hunting, and teaching (proctoring for "Feminist Theories of Sexed Subjectivity"), I've banned myself from all conferences (and other recreational travel) this spring/summer (except for the nearby Media in Transition).

WWW: Likewise, I've largely GAFIAted from online fandom for the moment. My apologies to anyone who misses me -- I miss you too. For the sake of my career and sanity, I have to reduce my internet time and prioritize personal and academic blogs.

But I'm not dead yet! Just thought I might be due for an update to that effect for the benefit of anyone who isn't reading twitter/facebook.

Academic Publishing in the Digital Age
HASTAC Forum, running NOW through November 16

Following from October's discussion of the importance of Fair Use, this forum will offer an opportunity to extend the dialogue about new challenges and opportunities in academic publishing today. As established print journals tend toward expensive and restricted subscriptions in response to current technological and financial conditions, a counter-movement is growing in support of online access to scholarship as a public good, led by open electronic journals and databases. Are traditional journals a relic of a pre-internet era, or does their publication model still have value in academia? How can either system be economically viable? Given that strict liability copyright standards are a hurdle for print journals, do electronic journals provide a necessary haven for the citation and transformation of proprietary artifacts and work? In a context where everyone can have a blog or home page, what do students and scholars need to know about the benefits and risks of self-publishing? And perhaps most importantly, what new possibilities for intellectual and creative work are capacitated by the web as a platform?

This goal of this forum is to explore the shifting definition of academic publishing in the digital age, as well as to consider the intellectual, creative and technical challenges which digital platforms pose for scholarly publication. The conversation will be co-hosted by HASTAC Scholars Chris Hanson of USC, who has worked for the online journal Vectors, and Julie Levin Russo of Brown, who works for the online journal Transformative Works and Cultures. They will be joined by other members of these publications' editorial and creative teams, including Kristina Busse, Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson and Erik Loyer. Vectors is an international electronic journal that brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, publishing works realized in multimedia that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. Transformative Works and Cultures is an Open Access international electronic journal on popular media and fan communities published by the Organization for Transformative Works, and invites authors to embrace the technical possibilities of the web and test the limits of academic writing. Both publications are copyrighted under Creative Commons licenses.

We hope to facilitate a venue in which we may all ask and answer questions about the present and future of digital scholarship. Please come join the discussion at http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-02-08Academic-Publishing-in-the-Digital-Age

I'm delighted to announce that I have been selected as one of this year's HASTAC Scholars! I will be posting regular videoblog entries about web technologies and participatory learning here starting sometime this week. I encourage you to engage with the work of all the HASTAC Scholars, as well as the organization's other exciting projects.

Also, I will be attending the LA Queer Studies Conference on October 10-11. Allow me to call special attention to my panel, which falls bright and early at 9:00-10:30am on Saturday morning:

Mediated Queer Socialities and Identities
Moderator: Mary L. Gray, Indiana University, Communication and Culture

Julie Levin Russo [my correction], Brown University, Modern Culture and Media
Labors of Love: Economies of Identity in The L Word’s Fan-Driven Online Promotions

Alexis Lothian, University of Southern California, English
Doing Boys Like They’re Girls, and Other (Trans)Gendered Subjects: The Queer Subcultural Politics of “Genderfuck” Fan Fiction

Jill A. Bakehorn, UC Davis, Sociology
Bordering on Activism: Authenticity and Identity Politics in Women-Made Porn

I'd be grateful for any feedback on this first draft of my cover letter template and dissertation description (for my CV, which is now updated). I've annotated the job letter for your edification; Tenured Radical's blog post is also a good place to start for understanding the formula. Please join the Media Studies Job Search facebook group if you're interested in such topics!

( diss description )

( cover letter )

It's important to us that Media Fetish: The Vidshow! be not only a fleeting local event, but a permanent virtual installation that the community can share. To that end, I have much belatedly transcribed excerpts of our remarks on the vids to post here. The full playlist is in the original entry; cut are a handful of vids where our observations are already more or less documented online, as well as familiar background information. Apologies for the abridgements, and for the sustained inelegance that comes of translating our extemporaneous performance to text. We were having a great time!

~ Julie Levin Russo and Francesca Coppa

( on with the show! )

I'm gearing up to draft my chapter on The L Word, which (with the exception of two preliminary salvos seen at fandebate) consists of entirely new research and writing. Yikes. My listing herein is largely for my own reference, but I'd treasure any bibliographic pearls of wisdom that you can cast before me, dear readers.

First of all, I'm trying to familiarize myself with interesting published work on the show, so let me know if you've seen any? I've got Reading The L Word as my proverbial beach reading, plus Candace Moore's article in a recent Cinema Journal.

Also, I'm sorting out whether this is the place to bring in radical queer political thought, like Warner, Berlant, Edelman, and Puar, which I desperately need to catch up on.

But mostly, I'm giving myself a crash course in Autonomist Marxism. Some of my fellow grad students are generously joining me in a summer reading group, and here's our ( 8-week syllabus )

Meanwhile, thanks to Wendy's excellent advising, I have exciting plans to move much of the BSG chapter's theory section to the diss's digital-focused conclusion, and lead into media hybrids instead with an expanded framework for hybridity incorporating both racial and queer notions of passing. For the former, I'm looking at Homi Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldua, and Chela Sandoval; for the latter, Judiths Butler and Halberstam -- who am I missing? I'm woefully subliterate in both queer and race theory. Oh, and apparently I should go to Tom Foster to learn more about technicity (he wrote The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory, but I think I can start with his essays in a couple anthologies that I already own). And I probably shouldn't leave out Haraway.

The recently-completed SVU chapter was a puzzle. I feel like it needs something more about the closet and/or queer representation, but in poking around I didn't turn up anything useful. Help?

Finally, I proposed to David the thought experiment of listing one's Top Ten Essays. This category is somewhat flexible, but the idea is that they have to be self-contained short works rather than books or book chapters. Here's mine: not necessarily my Top Ten Best, but my ( Top Ten Favorite )

I'm about to order a huge pile of books...