Welcome to a special Sopranos-themed week from In Media Res. All the pieces appearing this week will be focused on the series, which aired its final original episode a couple of weeks ago in the US (though not everywhere around the globe). Our curators will be approaching The Sopranos’ contributions to and place within media studies and television history from myriad perspectives. Please feel free to respond to their comments and add your own thoughts and ideas about the series.

This week’s IMR contributions also serve as a lead in for The Sopranos: A Wake* Conference to be held at Fordham University May 8-10, 2008.

Over the course of the summer, IMR will host several themed weeks dedicated to particular television series, media events, and scholarly topics. Our hope is that these intertwined nodes will form a larger networked conversation.

So, without further adieu, this week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, June 25, 2007 – David Lavery (Brunel University) presents: “Paulie Walnuts”

Tuesday, June 26, 2007 – Janet McCabe (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Kim Akass (Freelance writer) presents: “You have options …”

Wednesday, June 27, 2007 – Douglas Howard (Suffolk County Community College ) presents: “The Winning Side?: Agent Harris and the FBI on HBO’s The Sopranos”

Thursday, June 28, 2007 – Jason Jacobs (Griffith University) presents: “Money, Shame and Reparation: A Moment from The Sopranos”

Friday, June 29, 2007 – Maurice Yacowar (University of Calgary) presents: “The Feminist Sopranos”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

Ben has just reminded me of something that I meant to post, both here and at MediaCommons, after the New Structures, New Texts summit: Nature has recently announced the launch of a new pre-print server, Nature Precedings, intended to be an open-source, Creative Commons-licensed repository for material ranging from pre-publication articles to conference papers to other kinds of scientific ephemera (posters, slide presentations, and so forth). On the one hand, this is an exciting development — a recognition of the ways that scholarly communication is changing in the peer-to-peer era. On the other hand, as one speaker at the summit noted, this raises concerns for university-based repositories. As I just commented over at if:book, publishing “precedings” will allow Nature to claim some degree of “ownership” of scholarly material far sooner in the process of its development than it has to this point. And given that the Nature Publishing Group is a for-profit organ (a division of Macmillan), one has to wonder what how they might seek to capitalize on such ownership, and what the unintended consequences for scholars might wind up being.

(crossposted from Planned Obsolescence)

As MediaCommons moves forward with its efforts to create a born-digital scholarly press that re-imagines how digital scholarship looks and functions, we would like to know how contributors to In Media Res — past, present and future — have chosen (or will likely choose) to categorize their contributions for professional purposes.

Realizing that your answer might depend as much on your current status within the academy (tenured faculty, non-tenured faculty, graduate student, independent scholar, etc.) as on your philosophy about on-line publishing (or your department’s), we would also appreciate hearing why you have chosen (or not chosen) to list your IMR contributions as you currently have them.

Please use the comment field to elaborate.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, June 18, 2007 – Max Dawson (Northwestern University) presents: “The Power to Entertain Yourself: Mobile Video Strikes Out (Again)”

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 – Melissa Hardie (University of Sydney) presents: “Wrapped in Diapers, Built for Speed”

Wednesday, June 20, 2007 – Christian Erickson (Roosevelt University) presents: “Terror’s Blinding Horizon: /24 /and the Normalization of Nuclear Terrorism”

Thursday, June 21, 2007 – Tama Leaver (University of Western Australia) presents: “The Haunting of Spiders, Cities and DVDs”

Friday, June 22, 2007 – Dana Heller (Old Dominion University) presents: “The Mouth Wants What It Wants”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, June 11, 2007 – Jason Mittell (Middlebury College) presents: “Zen and the Art of Television”

Tuesday, June 12, 2007 – Joe Milutis (Brown University) presents: “Oscar versus the Information”

Wednesday, June 13, 2007 – Chuck Tryon (Fayetteville State University) presents: “Nuts!: The Fan Campaign to Save Jericho”

Thursday, June 14, 2007 – Dan Leopard (St. Mary’s College) presents: “King Anthracite: The Rock Man”

Friday, June 15, 2007 – Elizabeth Franko (University of Houston) presents: “Girl Power: Revisited”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

Session 4: New Economics

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Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:

Session 3: New Structures

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Session 2: New “Texts”

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Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.

Dan Greenstein, Vice Provost, University of California
“New Directions, Different Possibilities”

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I’m in Oakland for the day today, at a thoroughly exciting meeting: “New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Enterprise of Scholarly Publishing.” I’ll hope to post my notes here (as well as at Planned Obsolescence) either during the day today or in the coming days, as I process what’s said.