Welcome to a special Regional Media-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, February 25, 2008 – Victoria E. Johnson (University of California, Irvine) presents: “Revisiting Regionalism: Place-ing the Prime Time Past”

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 – Mark Williams (Dartmouth College) presents: “Burgundy Histories? WEWS-TV “Catch 5!” 1970s promo”

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 – Doug Battema (Western New England College) presents: “Baseball *Is* All It’s Quacked Up to Be”

Thursday, February 28, 2008 – Allison Perlman (Penn State Erie) presents: “Flying Classrooms in the Midwest: The MPATI’s Experiment in Regional Educational Television”

Friday, February 29, 2008 – Jeffrey P. Jones (Old Dominion University) presents: “What Role for Government TV in Community Life?”

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

Cross-posted from if:book

A thought-provoking “meta-post” from Noah Wardrip-Fruin on Grand Text Auto reflecting on the blog-based review of his new book manuscript four chapters (and weeks) into the process. Really interesting stuff, so I’m quoting at length:

This week, when I was talking with Jessica Bell about her story for the Daily Pennsylvanian, I realized one of the most important things, for me, about the blog-based peer review form. In most cases, when I get back the traditional, blind peer review comments on my papers and book proposals and conference submissions, I don’t know who to believe. Most issues are only raised by one reviewer. I find myself wondering, “Is this a general issue that I need to fix, or just something that rubbed one particular person the wrong way?” I try to look back at the piece with fresh eyes, using myself as a check on the review, or sometimes seek the advice of someone else involved in the process (e.g., the papers chair of the conference).

But with this blog-based review it’s been a quite different experience. This is most clear to me around the discussion of “process intensity” in section 1.2. If I recall correctly, this began with Nick’s comment on paragraph 14. Nick would be a perfect candidate for traditional peer review of my manuscript — well-versed in the subject, articulate, and active in many of the same communities I hope will enjoy the book. But faced with just his comment, in anonymous form, I might have made only a small change. The same is true of Barry’s comment on the same paragraph, left later the same day. However, once they started the conversation rolling, others agreed with their points and expanded beyond a focus on The Sims — and people also engaged me as I started thinking aloud about how to fix things — and the results made it clear that the larger discussion of process intensity was problematic, not just my treatment of one example. In other words, the blog-based review form not only brings in more voices (which may identify more potential issues), and not only provides some “review of the reviews” (with reviewers weighing in on the issues raised by others), but is also, crucially, a conversation (my proposals for a quick fix to the discussion of one example helped unearth the breadth and seriousness of the larger issues with the section).

On some level, all this might be seen as implied with the initial proposal of bringing together manuscript review and blog commenting (or already clear in the discussions, by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and others, of “peer to peer review”). But, personally, I didn’t foresee it. I expected to compare the recommendation of commenters on the blog and the anonymous, press-solicited reviewers — treating the two basically the same way. But it turns out that the blog commentaries will have been through a social process that, in some ways, will probably make me trust them more.

Welcome to a special Guilty Pleasures-themed week from In Media Res. All the contributions this week address this concept through texts that we, as scholars, are often conflicted to admit we enjoy watching. Please feel free to respond to the contributors’ comments.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, February 18, 2008 – Dan Leopard (St. Mary’s College) presents: “Carl Sagan’s Contact”

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 – Barbara Selznick (University of Arizona) presents: “Mothers and Daughters: Watching The Gilmore Girls”

Wednesday, February 20, 2008 – Michael Z. Newman (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) presents: “Transgression, Confession, and Ying Yang Twins’s ‘Wait (The Whisper Song)’”

Thursday, February 21, 2008 – Sarah Kremen-Hicks (Independent Scholar) presents: “A Demonic Ménage à Trois: Audience Participation and Bedroom Politics in Hex”

Friday, February 22, 2008 – Jeremy Butler (University of Alabama) presents: “Guts Don’t Come Cheap in the Cinématheque, Pal: Guilt, Pleasure, and America’s Funniest Home Videos”

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

Last week, Danah Boyd announced that henceforth she would only publish in open access journals and urged others — especially tenured faculty, who are secure in their status and have little to lose — to do the same.

I’d be sad to see some of the academic publishers go, but if they can’t evolve to figure out new market options, I have no interest in supporting their silencing practices. I think that scholars have a responsibility to make their work available as a public good. I believe that scholars should be valued for publishing influential material that can be consumed by anyone who might find it relevant to their interests. I believe that the product of our labor should be a public good. I do not believe that scholars should be encouraged to follow stupid rules for the sake of maintaining norms. Given that we do the bulk of the labor behind journals, I think that we can do it without academic publishers…

Welcome to a special LOST-themed week from In Media Res.

All of the pieces this week have been curated by contributors to the forthcoming anthology Reading Lost, edited by Roberta Pearson and published by I.B. Taurus. 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, February 11, 2008 – Roberta Pearson (University of Nottingham) presents: “Lost as TV3”

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 – Will Brooker (Kingston University) presents: ” Man Out of Time: Lost Season 3 Finale”

Wednesday, February 13, 2008a – Stacey Abbott (Roehampton University) presents: “The Conundrum of the Character-Driven Plot in Lost”

Wednesday, February 13, 2008b – Ivan Askwith (Big Spaceship) presents: “‘You Got No Idea What’s Goin’ On On That Island!’: Viewer Skepticism Over Lost’s Long-Term Plan”

Thursday, February 14, 2008 – Julian Stringer (University of Nottingham) presents: ” “*Lost* is a Four Letter Word”

Friday, February 15, 2008 – Jason Mittell (Middlebury College) presents: ” Synchronizing Complexity”

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, February 4, 2008 – Sam Ford (Massachusetts Institute for Technology) presents: “‘Cactus Jack and the Moral Justification of Great Wrestling Heels”.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008 – Jonathan Gray (Fordham University) presents: “Voting for Super Bullshit on Super Tuesday”

Wednesday, February 6, 2008 – Heather Hendershot (City University of New York, Queens College) presents: “‘Neurosis in the Defense of Liberty is No Vice: Extremism, Anxiety, and the 1964 Presidential Campaign”

Thursday, February 7, 2008 – Jacob Smith (University of Nottingham) presents: “Wave of Imitation”

Friday, February 8, 2008 – Catie Berkenfield (Old Dominion University) presents: “A Sphere of One’s Own”

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

Transformative Works and Cultures, an exciting new electronic journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works, has just released its first CFP:

New Journal Announcement/CFP

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is a Gold Open Access international peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works edited by Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.

TWC publishes articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived. We invite papers on all related topics, including but not limited to fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them. TWC’s aim is twofold: to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and the fan community.

We encourage innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches, including but not limited to feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, political economy, ethnography, reception theory, literary criticism, film studies, and media studies. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship, hypertext articles, or other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. TWC copyrights under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Theory accepts blind peer-reviewed essays that are often interdisciplinary, with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offers expansive interventions in the field of fan studies (5,000-8,000 words).

Praxis analyzes the particular, in contrast to Theory’s broader vantage. Essays are blind peer reviewed and may apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks (4,000-7,000 words).

Symposium is a section of editorially reviewed concise, thematically contained short essays that provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures (1,500-2,500 words).

Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and Web sites. Reviews incorporate a description of the item’s content, an assessment of its likely audience, and an evaluation of its importance in a larger context (1,500-2,500 words). Review submissions undergo editorial review; submit inquiries first to review@transformativeworks.org.

TWC has rolling submissions. Contributors should submit online through the Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org). Inquiries may be sent to the editors (editor@transformativeworks.org).

The call for papers is available as a .pdf download sized for U.S. Letter (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-flyer-US-letter.pdf) or European A4 (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/docs/twc-flyer-A4.pdf).