On Open Peer Review

I highly recommend the new ADA, Publishing and Its Discontents. I haven’t read it all, but greatly enjoyed the piece on “Feminist Journal Editing,” by Lisa McLaughlin, longtime editor of Feminist Media Studies. She carefully and honestly talks through the joys, disturbances and contradictions of both working for Taylor & Francis and the field she loves.

Speaking of content, participation and peer review, I’m co-editing ADA 5, “Queer Feminist Media Praxis,” with Kate O’Riordan and Aristea Fotopoulou, and our open peer-review is now open. That means you can join the collective and review one of the amazing articles we’ve gathered for this effort, articles of great range from “Love in the Time of Racism,” to “Unghosting Apparitional Lesbian History.”

If you’re not a member of Fembot Collective, the first step is to join. Email me, and I can nominate you. Once you’re a member you can join the effort. Of course, part of our feminist praxis is community, connection, mentorship, engagement, and dialogue, so I hope that will entice you.

Blogging (as) Feminist Digital Pedagogy

Enjoying a much-deserved drink with highly-Twitterate Jesse Daniels after a few days of talk, workshops, and video dialogues in Ann Arbor about Feminist Digital Pedagogy, we were discussing the changing culture of blogging, and other social media forms in relation to our own ever-changing digital metronomes. Which is a fancy way to say here what I said there: “I always used to blog about conferences, but now it feels like it takes T.o..o….l…o…n….g…t..o..b..l..o..g..; the work is t…o…o…h…a…r..d. What’s the deal with this quickening?”

Now, I won’t go into the long and short of that conversation held with several other bigwigs of the digerati—Andre Brock, Carrie Rentschler, Laura Wexler—but only begin there (and not at the panel) for two reasons (which were, in fact, big ideas covered at the panel):

• work in critical, feminist digital studies is about theorizing and practicing our own experience in real time with others (this was one of Rentschler’s points at the Michigan workshop: our feminist digital pedagogy is occurring wherever we meet, online and off, and not just, or perhaps hardly ever, in the classroom) so as to be activist and present and critical together (she mentioned discussion and actions about “Rape Culture” online, and nowhere near “academic feminism,” as one kind of place for professors to look; meanwhile, Laura Wexler reminded us that much of what we need to know, we’ve already done, which is to say the process is also archival and cyclical; see Maria Cotera’s amazing DH project, “Chicana Por Mi Raza: Uncovering the Hidden History of Chicana Feminism (1965-1985), also discussed at the workshop)
• because, of course, we have long known we had to perform our feminist praxis in sites in and out of the academy, in multiple formats and to different audiences. And now we might all agree that a new part of our feminist digital pedagogy is also to divvy up the temporal spectrum, and each take some responsibility to hold down the short or medium and even, yes, long form, making sure we are present in the immediate, gratifying flows of Twitter as well as guaranteeing that we are lying safe for the long run on paper in a library.

Crank (or should I say crunk) it back a day, and move the (my) body to Rutgers, and similar conversations were happening, under the same title, only in a different room, and to a similar but unique crowd (online and off: see Adeline Koh’s Storify version).

Now, you might ask, why two conferences, two cities, three days? What is this telling us about this metronome and its unique piano-home? A conference, as you all know, is a kind of medium speed but fully-placed venture: long talks, all day in one room, some need for a coffee and pee break, but the sustaining, necessary gratification of f2f: we must be present to each other … sometimes.

As was true just a year or two ago, when the fembot collective and the femtechnet one found ourselves forming in distinct places, for varied (feminist, digital) ends, but at the same time, and then worked together to divvy up some of that HUGE map-of-affective-labor, this current synchronicity marks a pulse we can all be nourished and energized by across our differences. Rutgers and Michigan held these sister conferences because they want to up their digital games. That’s because over just the past few years a large enough number of us have organized in a lot of places, temporalities, and forms, so as to create visibility, community, and output, so as to make it crystal clear what was always true: that there’s a new and old game in many time-frames and in a world of places; miss it to your own loss.

Multi-Modal (Peer) Writing annd Review

These are loose ideas to initiate conversation with Julia Lesage and friends from ADA .It will be a live, online conversation on, January 17: Multimodal Editing and the Future (join us)! We”ll start with  On Publishing My YouTube “Book” Online (September 24, 2009) because here I list and demonstrate many of the issues, questions, delights and concerns about this kind of scholarly work and practice. I’ll ask to watch a brief section of this video:

I have three large points about new affordances, traditional rubrics, and their intersections and frustrations that I will make in my brief presentations before we have a conversation .

1) Why would you write online? What are its affordances?

• Because you are working on Internet culture, databases, or other objects or cultures or practices that (in part) reside online
• Thereby your access and your readers’ is streamlined
• You write in the vernacular, community, structure you analyze:
  • self-reflexive
• You need not describe, you can build (or analyze), from shared interaction with the object you study

A) It allows for multi-modal authorship

• Creative possibilities including: montage, sound, image, design
• Expressive possibilities in same vernacular you study
• Collaborative authoring possibilities:
  • with your “subjects,” “readers,” or “students”

B)  Different writing practices: See FLYT on Writing Practices

• Iterative
• Interactive
• Quick; Short
• Vernacular
• Public

C) Different audiences and places for scholarly practice

• Outside academia
• Public
• Your Subject

D) Different reading practices

• Distracted
• Quick, short
• Interactive

E) Different structures of vetting

• Free
• Open Source
• New models for peer review (or not)

E) Different paradigms, practices of Publishing

• “The Absurdities of Moving from Paper to Digital in Academic Publishing (June 11, 2010),” LFYT

2) Traditional Rubrics for Academic Writing (apologies to Rhetoricians and Scholars of Writing, this is my quick list and I’m ready for your additions and nuances!)

1. hypothesis and thesis
2. research: footnotes, bibliography
3. analysis: clearly expressed, smart, original
4. proof: facts, data, quotations
5. detail: relevant, elegant, supportive
6. coherent structure: 5 pg. paper, 10 pg. paper, dissertation
7. style: clear, pretty, personal, impersonal
8. rhetorical paradigm
9. Awareness of audience

3) Questions for conversation:

• How do you graft 1) New Affordances to 2) Traditional Rubrics?
  • Thesis is easy! Research is the same.
  • So are footnotes and bibliography, although they could take many forms and sit in many places (i.e. they could be spoken, or written on an image as text)
• What needs to shift or change entirely?
  • Structures: papers are cumbersome and incorrect
  • Style: different audiences and reading practices

Facing Down the DST/DH Divide

My Visual Research Methods course has ended, and as ever, my grad students in a range of programs at CGU have done inspiring and inventive work to wrap up this class which pushes traditional Humanities grad students to roll up their sleeves, work with their hands, imagine new audiences and formats, and think about academic labor and standards using new rubrics.

This year, our assigned readings—in Nick Mirzoeff’s Visual Culture Reader, the Debates in the Digital Humanities Reader, and two books about the ongoing and ever-widening Center for Digital Storytelling’s project—linked as they were to an ever more frightening and quickly shifting job market for graduate students, seemed to have helped push this batch of students to do some remarkably innovative digital scholarship, for their final work, thinking about the role of digital storytelling as both a subject and method for scholarly output.

I hope you’ll take a peek at these compelling projects:

• A “nod to Lambert, but in a very deliberate style that was anti-Lambert (no voice-over, no clean or clearly announced thesis) … also an attempt to have this video be a moment of reflection, a meditation of sorts on friendship,” AIDS, place, and memory (from a PhD student in religion)
• a digital story, made collaboratively with the maker’s high school students to create an “affective space” much like that previously “carved out through the epistle allowing women, a group previously written out of agency to write/right wrongs through new narratives in much the same way that digital storytelling empowers its creator. Telling my story, working delicately against and with the grain of rhetorical confines and the explosively complex element of my students’ personhoods demanded the kind of suturing of disparate intentions so pleasurable to read in the 18thC epistolary novels” (from a PhD student in English, also a High School English teacher)
• A video focused upon building “community  around and for people dealing with mental illness, who are working to cope with their symptoms in the midst of the exceptional stress of grad school life. My hope is to create a digital story telling circle that will do just that.” (from a Master’s student in Cultural Studies)
• An argument for the storytelling power of Instagram (so against the Lambert idea that the Internet produces fragments) (from a Master’s student in Cultural Studies)
• A consideration of #ANA on YouTube and Instragram as digital stories (by a Master’s student in Cultural Studies)
• A consideration of #Carol Corps in light of Digital Storytelling (by a Master’s Student in Cultural Studies)
• A consideration of social media and digital storytelling through three voices of a vegan and animal lover (by a Masters student in Cultural Studies)
• A work on and as digital storytelling about an artist and a friendship (by a PhD student in English)
• A digital story that draws the story of YouTube drawing stories (by a PhD student in History)
• An analysis of how the academy is embracing digital storytelling as research method (by a Master’s student in Cultural Studies)
• A digital story using “a personal narrative of my memories of my aunt’s illness and how I experienced the confusion of coming to terms with her diagnosis as HIV positive. I believe personal narratives such as this are missing from outreach efforts that have aimed to target the Black community in order to bring awareness of the high rates within the community.” (by a Master’s student in Applied Women’s Studies)

Signification Survival: Jump Cut 55

The new issue of Jump Cut (55, Fall 2013) is hot off the presses, and as always, it is bursting with great scholarly work on any number of issues near and dear to my heart: labor, third cinema, new queer cinema (by my compatriot, Roxanne Samer), feminist porn (by the delightful, Erica Rand), independent and experimental media (with an essay on Amateur Media by the always-on-the-money Patricia Zimmerman), and a statement on “The War on/in Higher Education” by the journal’s luminary editors (that thoughtfully addresses MOOCs, and other issues, a theme I will attend to in my upcoming post on my recent participation at the MWHEC meetings on this very topic.)

And that’s just my tip of the iceberg; there’s thirty or more essays to find and enjoy there!

Of course, while you’re checking it out, I do hope you’ll also spend some time with the special section I co-authored with Marty Fink, David Oscar Harvey and Bishnu Gosh on contemporary HIV/AIDS Activist Media. Our shared effort looks to links and disturbances across time, generation, place, region, and activist representational practices and media over the lengthy and always changing history of AIDS activist media. My piece, “Acts of Signification Survival,” focuses on both the spate of recent documentaries by my peers about AIDS activism’s past, and what their online life tells us more generally about activist media within digital culture. I write: “it is my belief that digital media brings in new concerns and different cycles. For one, in regards to the documentaries under consideration, the digital allows for what might seem an over-abundance of digital discourse and debate about what also can be perceived as a torrent of images and discourse that have as their subject our past fights for visibility. This produces a particularly clumsy incongruity: these many instances of visibility (the docs and their digital discussion) sit precariously near the constant specter of a diminishment of perceptibility.”

“Everything is Coming up Undetectable” by the Visual AIDS Staff for “Undetectable,” the Visual AIDS Summer 2012 Show.

 

Now I’ll Blog It: Re #tcfw

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending some of THATCamp Feminisms West. I had to leave just before the much-deserved beer-part to pick up my son, and knew I was in good company when this sacrifice made sense as such, nothing more needing to be said. But in my afternoon there, I was privy to conversations and processes that remind me of why we need to meet and work as feminists about and in digital culture. I will indicate a few of those reasons here, and I’m also going to to do quickly and on my blog.

Now, why this quick “work” on a Saturday morning. First, I have to give an interview to a college student this morning, in an hour, about (my) queer family: another important digital feminist act. Secondly, I want to blog about this while it is still happening (day two is starting now), because it may allow a few people who might want to know about it to follow the twitter-feed, and thereby attend. Third, I acknowledge and mark the value of my colleagues’ work when I blog it, and I feel this is a particular kind of feminist mentoring that senior women in academia can and do provide online. There’s been some great posts about academic blogging in the past few days (brought to my attention my Adeline Koh on Facebook). All by women, iterating what we get here. I wrote a similar post last year.

In our unpanel, DH400, we had the rare opportunity to talk about DH beyond 101. I was particularly interested to meet the women behind #TransformDH who I’ve been following for awhile. Our conversation focused upon our various, precarious, disruptive, transformative, outsider/insider relationships to the academy: as grad students, as archivists, as activists. To me it is was less the DH, or even the digital, that made this conversation matter, but the feminist: because we shared values, the will and capacity to be critical as well as intellectual while being supportive and trying to distribute authority and voice around the room all the while working, quick. Mia Ridge asked us “What would a feminist Digging into Data project look like?” And Jacque Wernimont said: “It would probably be related to little ‘dh’ and the owning of ephemerality.” Yep.

In the other panel I attended, on feminist digital pedagogy, I brought people up to speed on the DOCC 2013. And then we talked productively and honestly about teaching. With undergrads, librarians, grad students, jr and snr profs in the room, (or as@miriamkp tweeted: A really nice mix of students, faculty, librarians, nonprofit professionals (with diverse interests) here at #tcfw) we were able to be vulnerable, uncertain, and also wicked smart. Anne Cong-Huyen and Viola Lasmana discussed power sharing, doing things in public, acquiring skills, risk-taking, modelling ownership of our content and controlling our online identities (for their students and themselves), as well as the perennial contradictions of anonymity, discipline, and grading in classes with hands-on, experimental components. One hour, so much said and done: together, in a room, and on twitter, and now here, doing all the things that these technologies afford to us as communities, and as individuals.

I write quickly on my blog on a Saturday morning because this kind of work makes me feel like an academic in a conversation with politicized others. I make this to mark that.

On Sharing

Please feel free to share:

This Week’s Survey Question:

What are the major social/legal/professional stakes with sharing online?

Children “share” during “sharing time” at school: my mouse, mom, yo-yo trick. Academic bloggers share details about what is behind-the-scenes: my lunch, boss, anxieties. Sharing as inclusion of personal experience into public spaces where such information has been deemed inappropriate, off-limits, non-academic. Sharing at its juvenile and narcissistic best and worst. The risks are both obvious and gendered: an embarrassing myopia, a gross mis-step in propriety, a female fall into feelings. No professional wants to be treated like a child (or a woman). The risks are in vetting; the rewards come by way of expanded expression …

I continue on Media Commons

 

 

“I made my mourning productive, collective, and interactive …” on Visual AIDS

“How can we understand this moment of ‘AIDS Crisis Revisitation’, exemplified by the success of films like United in Anger and How to Survive a Plague. Video artist, activist, and academic Alexandra Juhasz provides some insight.

Making and thinking about AIDS activist video since the mid 80’s, Juhasz coined the term “Queer Archive Activism”. In this first of two blog post Visual AIDS interviews her about her term and in the next post we flesh how Queer Archive Activism works in the world. Visit Alexandra Juhasz’s website.

Visual AIDS: Can you tell me about your phrase Queer Archive Activism? What does it mean? Where did it come from?

see my answers on Visual AIDS’ website!

An Unconference on Feminist Multimodal Publishing and Collaboration

By Chelsea B.

Portland, Oregon; White Stag Building: Papé Forum
Saturday & Sunday, 9-5 pm; 9-10 February 2013

Slightly over a year after Fembot launched its first feature, Laundry Day, members of the collective will meet in Portland, Oregon, for a two-day unconference to discuss Fembot’s past, present, and future. Goals for this event include:

• To think collectively and critically about the features Fembot has experimented with over the past year

• To think about the Fembot Project holistically and in light of its more-or-less organic unfolding over the past eighteen months

• To collaboratively assess the site’s design and functionality, as well as its aesthetics, particularly in relation to our sister project, FemTechNet

• To establish goals for the coming year, including discussion of a Fembot ThatCamp (July 2013, Portland).

The unconference is free and open to all members of the Fembot collective. If you can’t join us in Portland, follow along and participate on Twitter at #fembotjam.

We’re excited to announce the following confirmed participants:

Karen Alexander (Rutgers), Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green), Kim Sawchuk (Concordia), Paula Gardner (OCAD), Nina Huntemann (Suffolk), Alex Juhasz (Pitzer), Sarah Stierch (Wikimedia), Carol Stabile (Oregon), Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths), and Kate Mondloch (Oregon)

Blogging as Public Pedagogy

At the ASA conference in Puerto Rico I drank some rum, swam in the ocean, saw dear friends, and went to a terrific roundtable on blogging with GayProf, Historiann, Roxie, and Tenured Radical. As I said to my friend Planned Obsolescence, who sat beside me at the workshop and was the person who actually turned me on to blogging, this is yet another one of those professional pastimes that we engage in privately, rarely sharing the logic, feeling, and changing rationale of the work with others who expend similar amounts of time and soul. It was a real pleasure to hear four others at this: something I tried to share this summer.

As ever, locked as we are in the neo-liberal logics of counting, tabulation, and credit, the speakers and blogger-audience spent some useful attention on what kind of work this is and whether and to who it matters. Remedying intellectual isolation, personal survival, finding new audiences and speaking in new languages (often including humor) were discussed by several of the panelists. This seemed familiar, and thereby reassuring.

However, it was Tenured Radical’s discussion of commenting that was at farthest reach from my own thinking and experience, and therefore also the most generative. First off, she gets comments—tons of them it seems—as do the other bloggers at the podium. Now, I’ve lamented here often enough about the fact that I can see that you are reading, but rarely hear form you, but as the years have gone by, I’ve taken this to be the state of this state and have grown pretty accustomed to it. Later, beach-side, I spoke with Marilee Lindemann about this (she actually teaches a course on blogging, Writing for the Blogosphere, as well as being Roxie), and she listed some pretty obvious things that I don’t do that might initiate a commenting culture here: asking questions rather than making sttements, not writing arguments that are closed and complete, having a more chatty style and fun content …

And, I realize, I don’t not do these things not because I can’t but because much of what comes along with commenting is not what blogging has become for me: what Claire Potter called Skooling and Being Skooled. This arguing, flaming, deliberate disrespect, and enforced education without the assurance of discussion or responsibility that attends to places of learning that I like better, like the feminist classroom, has been something my students I and think a lot about in FeministOnline Spaces and even Learning from YouTube, for that matter. Of course, Potter is right: by learning from comments, just like from YouTube, one gains insight into the narrative rules of others’ lives, not just one’s own. A light shines on the larger Internet, and its darker places, not to mention its super silly (supercilious) ones: