Welcome to a special Fannish Vidders-themed week from In Media Res. Please feel free to respond to the contributors’ comments and add your own thoughts and ideas about the series as well.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, January 28, 2008 – Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College) presents: “Pressure” - a metavid by the California Crew

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 – Tisha Turk (University of Minnesota, Morris) presents: “Not Only Human” - an X-Files vid by Killa and Laura Shapiro”

Wednesday, January 30, 2008 – Jacqueline Kjono (independent scholar) presents: “A Day in the Life” - a Dead Zone vid by Shalott and Speranza

Thursday, January 31, 2008 – Louisa Stein (San Diego State University) presents: “Bricks” - a Supernatural vid by Luminosity

Friday, February 1, 2008 – Kristina Busse (independent scholar) presents: “Us” - a multivid by Lim

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

Yesterday morning, I began the process of blocking out the new article I’m working on, focusing on the history and future of peer review. And not a moment too soon, apparently. This morning, via the Chronicle (and if:book) comes the announcement of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s peer-review experiment: Noah’s publishing his book manuscript, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, in a modified version of CommentPress on the Grand Text Auto blog, at the same time his editor, Doug Sery, sends it out for traditional peer review.

Noah’s interest in this experiment has its origins in his desire to have as his primary peer reviewers the social network that has developed around his blog, feeling certain that those readers are the ones who will provide the greatest insight into his project. Doug Sery, for his part, agreed, while remaining somewhat skeptical:

He insisted on running the manuscript through the traditional peer-review process as well. “We are a peer-review press—we’re always going to want to have an honest peer review,” says Mr. Sery, senior editor for new media and game studies. “The reputation of MIT Press, or any good academic press, is based on a peer-review model.”

The origins of that “traditional” model of peer review, its presumptions of honesty, and the lock that it has on current models of academic authority are precisely the subject of the article I’m now working on, so I’m looking forward to watching Noah’s experiment develop. I’m also watching with great anticipation to see what this experiment bodes for MediaCommons, where we hope to develop a new model of “peer-to-peer review” that might not simply exist alongside traditional blind peer review but in fact augment and surpass it as a mode of creating and measuring authority in the age of the network.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, January 21, 2008 – Cynthia Fuchs (George Mason University) presents: “‘Exploited in a very ugly way’: Iraq war refugees in Syria”.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 – Jeffrey Sconce (Northwestern University) presents: “Be–Be–Beaver Boys”

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 – Cynthia Chris (City University of New York, Staten Island) presents: “‘Just One Catch’: Wild on the CW”

Thursday, January 24, 2008 – Christian Erickson (Roosevelt University) presents: “No Future?/Fight the Future!: Terminator4 (Sarah Connor Chronicles) and Virtual Communities of Resistance”

Friday, January 25, 2008 – Melissa Hardie (University of Sydney) presents: “Ornament and Crime: Figuring Out Space in Damages”

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

Welcome to the first installment of volume 4 and a special Irony and Politics-themed week from In Media Res.

Please feel free to respond to their comments and add your own thoughts and ideas about the series as well.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, January 14, 2008 – Ted Gournelos (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) presents: “South Park’s Ironic Whiteness”

Tuesday, January 15, 2008 – Amber Day (Bryant University) presents: “Ironic Authenticity: Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping”

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 – Ian Reilly (University of Guelph) presents: “Two Words: Chuck Norris”

Thursday, January 17, 2008 – Catherine Burwell (University of Toronto) presents: “Calling on the Colbert Nation: How fan practices complicate irony”

Friday, January 18, 2008 – Viveca Greene (Hampshire College) presents: “Shirley, You Can’t Be Serious”

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

Cross-posted from if:book.

Last week there was a wave of takedowns on YouTube of copyright-infringing material — mostly clips from television and movies. MediaCommons, the nascent media studies network we help to run, felt this rather acutely. In Media Res, an area of the site where media scholars post and comment on video clips, uses YouTube and other free hosting sites like Veoh and blip.tv to stream its video. The upside of this is that it’s convenient, free and fast. The downside is that it leaves In Media Res, which is quickly becoming a valuable archive of critically annotated media artifacts, vulnerable to the copyright purges that periodically sweep fan-driven media sites, YouTube especially.

In this latest episode, a full 27 posts on In Media Res suddenly found themselves with gaping holes where video clips once had been. The biggest single takedown we’ve yet experienced. Fortunately, since we regard these sorts of media quotations as fair use, we make it a policy to rip backups of every externally hosted clip so that we can remount them on our own server in the event of a takedown. And so, with a little work, nearly everything was restored — there were a few clips that for various reasons we had failed to back up. We’re still trying to scrounge up other copies.

The MediaCommons fair use statement reads as follows:

MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of “fair use.” If such quotation is necessary to a scholar’s argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar’s original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text — but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it — we must defend the scholar’s right to quote from the media texts under study.

The good news is that In Media Res carries on relatively unruffled, but these recent events serve as a sobering reminder of the fragility of the media ecology we are collectively building, of the importance of the all too infrequently invoked right of fair use in non-textual media contexts, and of the need for more robust, legally insulated media archives. They also supply us with a handy moral: keep backups of everything. Without a practical contingency plan, fair use is just a bunch of words.

Incidentally, some of these questions were raised in a good In Media Res post last August by Sharon Shahaf of the University of Texas, Austin: The Promises and Challenges of Fan-Based On-Line Archives for Global Television.

On Monday, January 14th, 2008, In Media Res will kick off its fourth volume with a themed week devoted to irony and politics.

I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to this past volume. We had wonderful individual contributions from:

Hector Amaya, Tim Anderson, Ben Aslinger, Kyle Barnett, Catie Berkenfield, Robert Bodle, Cynthia Chris, Christian Erickson, Elizabeth Franko, Cynthia Fuchs, Radhika Gajjala, Jonathan Gray, Joshua Green, David Gurney, Tanner Higgin, Derek Johnson, Michael Lecker, Christopher Lucas, Tara McPherson, Walter Metz, Kyle Nicholas, Afsheen Nomai, Tasha Oren, Laurie Ouellette, Dave Parry, Roberta Pearson, Jennifer Petersen, Judd Ruggill, Avi Santo, Craig O. Stewart, Ethan Thompson, and Chuck Tryon

We also had fantastic themed weeks on:

Nordic Media:
Christian Christensen, Sari Elfving, Anna Orrghen, Mari Pajala, Espen Ytreberg

Latino Media in the US:
Mary Beltran, Mari Castaneda, Antonio Lapastina, Juan Pinon, Joseph Straubhaar

Fandom:
Francesca Coppa, John Hartley, Matt Hills, Aswin Punathambekar, Louisa Stein

Pre-1960s Corporate Authorship:
Christopher Anderson, Kyle Barnett, Kyle Edwards, Michael Kackman, Avi Santo

Dance and Media:
Jane Desmond, Zachary Dorsey, Dana Heller, Kelli Kilgore, Anna Beatrice Scott

Alternative Media:
Chris Atton, Dorothy Kidd, Allison Perlman, Clemencia Rodriguez, Laura Stein

The WGA Strike:
Miranda Banks, Julia Himberg, Jennifer Holt, Derek Kompare, Ellen Seiter

I thought MediaCommons readers might be interested in my blog review of Patricia Aufderheide’s Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction, especially given the book’s attention to new forms of documentary identified with the internet (cross-posted at The Chutry Experiment):

As documentary films persist as an important aspect of the wider cinematic public sphere, definitions of documentary and its social and political role have become increasingly important. Invariably, when I mention at a cocktail party that I am interested in documentary, at least one partygoer will corner me in the kitchen and challenge me to offer a clear definition of what counts as a “documentary” (usually this accompanies a demand that I renounce Michael Moore as a documentary filmmaker, a demand that I typically resist, depending upon how contrarian I am feeling). But as this scenario of the hypothetical partygoer implies, defining documentary opens up a number of ethical and historical quandaries that are sometimes difficult to answer. It is in this context that I read Patricia Aufderheide’s breezy but informative Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction, part of the Oxford University Press “Very Short Introduction” series. And while I haven’t read other books in the series, Aufderheide’s book seems to fulfill the goal of the series, providing an accessible overview of the history of documentary and the political, social, and ethical questions that emerge from that history. It’s something that could easily be read while traveling or on mass transit, but I would add that the chapters are often substantive enough that the book could also be used in introductory-level film courses, especially if you are concerned about students’ textbook budgets. The book’s conclusion, I will argue later, is especially pertinent to documentary scholars and manages to raise some important issues about the study of documentary in a way that the casual reader will understand.

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