When TWC’s No. 6 (History issue) came out a few weeks ago, we had a not-so-minor snafu: all the hotlinks in the press release were broken. The reason? We had (cleverly, we thought) drafted the press release using DOIs instead of URLs, and we had problems with the issue’s DOI deposit.

DOIs, or digital object identifiers, are a way to pretend that Web items are permanent. Web sites change so frequently that links continually get broken. DOIs aim to help solve this problem: an online item, in this case a journal article, is assigned a unique identifier, and then that identifier is linked to a URL in a database. When you hit the identifier, it searches the database for the URL and then goes there. The DOI record file is simply updated when the URL changes. One goal of DOIs is to expedite persistence of online content. When we wrote the press release, we used the DOIs because the links would persist, and theoretically, anyone running across it years later would still be able to hit live links.

The most widely used DOI service is CrossRef, whose “mandate is to connect users to primary research content, by enabling publishers to work collectively. CrossRef is also the official DOI link registration agency for scholarly and professional publications.” Their Free DOI Lookup lets you type in information and return a DOI. You may also type a DOI in a box on their home page, and it will take you right to the relevant URL, often not the article itself but a summary page that lists all the options available for viewing, downloading, or purchasing content. (You may also add “http://dx.doi.org/” before the DOI to turn it into a URL.)

The DOI system is very flexible and can take any number of forms. A sample DOI from TWC No. 6 is “10.3983/twc.2011.0272.” Here’s what it means: first is our unique DOI number (10.3983), which was assigned to us when we signed up and paid our fees. Next are the journal abbreviation (twc), the year (2011), and a minimum-four-digit individual article number (0272), which is the same as the article’s OJS submission record. We made up the whole format to please ourselves, and to permit future growth—for example, we could replace “twc” with something else to reflect something else we wanted to index, like a monograph.

According to the DOI folks, the DOI system is “A system for persistent, semantically interoperable, identification of intellectual property entities on any digital network.” Various sorts of metadata may be uploaded into each item’s database entry—not just the URL, but also things like author names, whether the item is online or print, journal titles, journal abbreviated titles, whether the item is full text or abstract only, page number for first page, year of publication, in-house identifier, volume and issue, and individual references cited inside the article. The information chosen by the administrator to be collected is typed into an XML form, and that form is uploaded into a DOI system. TWC doesn’t deposit much: we file the first author, the URL, and the journal’s status as online (as opposed to print).

Although DOIs are most often identified with journals in the sciences with an online presence, TWC joined the club because we approve of the theory of the persistence of links. As part of the deal with DOI, we have to hotlink to DOIs in the articles’ works cited sections, so an issue or so back, we researched all the works cited sections of all the published articles and added in the DOIs so we would be compliant. Now we do this for each article as a production step; we have a CrossRef account that permits batch querying.

Regarding TWC’s failed deposit for No. 6: it turned out that the DOI folks had changed the way the deposit was formatted (in their terms, they updated to a new schema), only we didn’t know about it. We thought we were incorrectly formatting the XML file. We spent a lot of time examining it, trying to figure out where we went wrong. We got it done, but days late. Still, we’re committed to the broader issue of persistence of online content: in addition to depositing DOIs, TWC grants permission to libraries to make archive copies of each issue, and of course TWC’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License copyright lets anybody who wants to (nonprofit only!) duplicate the entire text and credit back to the original source—and we hope people will use the DOI, naturally, not the URL.

TWC is using an established tool built for scholars to help persistence of data. But it makes me wonder: what do fans do to ensure that an online fan artwork can be found? I can think of a few strategies: continuously curated links roundups, multiple copies of items at several blogs and archives, screenshots of artwork, zipped and filed files (vids? art? stories?) maintained in locked communities. (Comment with more!) It just reminds me of how much we rely on fans’ time-consuming, detailed organizational work to find things.

The latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures has arrived, and it’s a special issue about “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein. There’s a lot of great material to sift through, so I’ll focus on the ideas that struck closest to home for me, particularly those articulated by Alexis Lothian in her symposium piece, “An archive of one’s own: Subcultural creativity and the politics of conservation.” But before I get to Lothian’s thought-provoking meditation on the politics of archiving fanworks, I will situate it within one of the major research questions posed by Reagin and Rubenstein in their introduction to the issue.

In this introduction, the authors explore the various points of connection between academic historical study and fan studies, noting that the two disciplines have not yet taken full advantage of the conversation made possible by their shared investments. Most importantly, they note that, rather than taking recognizably fannish subcultures and their associated practices seriously as exemplifying a particular mode of engagement with the phenomena of media history,

“historians have tended to analyze audiences and consumers as though they exemplified historical processes unrelated to media…it can be difficult to uncover what audience members or fans themselves thought, while many sources document the ideas, emotions, and intentions of the producers of commercial entertainments. “(4.2-4.4; emphasis mine)

In other words, historians have often used media artifacts and the traces left by their producers and fans as undifferentiated evidence of larger socio-historical phenomena, rather than zeroing in on what attentive fans may always have known, which I will summarize in quick shorthand as the intellectual pleasure of engaging with media artifacts on their own terms, and within dynamic interpretive communities, which in turn establish their own meta-level investments separate from the media artifact. Of course, this is by no means true of all historians — there are plenty of social historians who are deeply attentive to the history of interpretive communities and “schools of thought,” although in my personal experience, these are as likely to be found in an English or Sociology department as they are in a History department.

As to the second part of the quotation, about the tendency of historians and academics in general to privilege the producers’ interpretations of their own work over those interpretations, regardless of how loving or critical, put forth by fans, this reveals a more unfortunate power dynamic replicated by mainstream historical narratives of the relationship between media artifacts and social movements and worlds. And in order to address this power dynamic, the authors turn to the great thinker Walter Benjamin, who theorized a more intimate connection between media artifacts and the specific historical moments in which they are produced and are read (paying particular attention to the fact that these moments are not the same, that is, that media artifacts age according to a logic all their own, distinct from mainstream historical logic).

Lothian, in her symposium piece, takes on the French thinker Jacques Derrida, whose ideas were deeply influenced by Benjamin, especially when it comes to taking reading seriously, and thus, by extension, taking the archival act seriously. While Benjamin’s work speaks explicitly to questions people have about the first half of the Twentieth Century, especially regarding how film came to dominate visual culture, Derrida’s more recent work speaks even more closely to the New Media landscape fans now inhabit, making his work more relevant for pressing questions about the emerging shape of the contemporary archives of fanworks. While Benjamin’s politics remain difficult to translate onto the contemporary sphere, Derrida’s assessment of the power imbalances made visible by emerging archival practices speak closely to the concerns articulated by Lothian in her piece.

Lothian’s piece nicely delineates the ways in which fans are currently disempowered by media owners and U.S. law (ways likely familiar to anyone reading this post), and then goes on to speak to the specific and strategic value of the Archive of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works. Particularly in a historical moment in which the institutions that chronicle and archive our cultural moment, especially libraries, are under attack, it seems to me to be an awfully good idea to take control of our own desire to organize and collect those fanworks that we have produced and loved and learned from. But I also admire Lothian’s insistence on registering what may be lost in the process, according to the current logic of the archive.

This is the kind of rhetorical move of which Benjamin is fond — to take note of, and pay attention to, what seems to be fading, or shifting away from the center, precisely at the moment that it loses its power. Lothian’s discussion of Fandom Wank, and the way in which it represents what would be difficult to archive under the AO3’s current system, is really interesting in this regard — it reminds me of various homages to Geocities and Friendster, although perhaps it’s better compared to current conversations surrounding 4chan as the lingering anti-Facebook part of the internet, insisting on the ephemeral as a much-needed antidote to the implicit ban on anonymity from that site.

I want to emphasize the political undercurrent of Lothian’s argument at the end of the piece, where she states that “if we want to take seriously the possibility that ephemeral conflict and online sex might function to undermine dominant sexual, gendered, racialized, and economic ways of being, both on- and off-line, we cannot restrict fannish politics to the easily archivable.” Again, the difference Lothian carves out between strategic political action at the de facto “public face” of fandom and the messier, recognizably queer, politics of and within specific fan communities, is crucial to this argument. I know that I am invested in preserving the genuinely transformative energy of these more interpersonal kinds of politics, but I also think that there is a real need for nonprofit organizations like the OTW to balance the increasingly commercial rest of the internet.

Issue 6, people! Check it out!

Thanks to the recent release of the 16th edition of the venerable Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), I redid the in-house style sheet for Transformative Works and Cultures, just in time for the production team to start work on the March issue. The style sheet is a document that outlines how information ought to appear so that it’s presented consistently across documents. It specifies such things as how references are styled, what heads look like, and how units of numbers are presented. TWC follows CMOS closely in virtually every respect.

A style does more than simply provide a template that permits many people to work on a single project and be confident of some degree of conformity. The style chosen makes a statement about the kind of information it presents. TWC uses author–year style (CMOS Documentation II), which marks us as falling under a media studies/social sciences rubric rather than a humanities rubric. The presentation of the year in text foregrounds the importance of timely work. Any scholar glancing casually at TWC can infer a lot just by noticing our citation style.

But choosing to style something a particular way can also make a political statement. As an example, take the styling of, for race, Black versus black, White versus white. Depending on context, the capitalized version can indicate anything from official US Census demographic categories to radical political leanings. If it’s capitalized, it’s got to be meaningful. (TWC follows CMOS, which likes down style: black, white.)

Politically speaking, in the small world of fan studies, one could argue that fanfic is used so commonly by fans themselves that TWC ought to style it like that. We don’t. We use fan fic because that is how it appears in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition (MW; updated version available at MerriamWebster.com), which we follow slavishly for spellings, even going so far as to permit it to override CMOS where they differ. One reason is that we don’t want to imply that fan is a prefix—it can’t be, because it is a noun, a word meaningful on its own. But another, more important reason is that we think separating the two words emphasizes the status of the fan herself. Thus in TWC’s style, fan words are almost always open compounds, not solid or hyphenated compounds: fan work, fan artwork, fan vid. It’s not a fanwork; it’s a fan work, a work created by an agent, the fan. By styling it open, we are making a kind of political statement that emphasizes agency.

However, when it comes right down to it, TWC likes to use published reference works to make production easier: team members and authors can look items up and be confident they are correctly styled, and, at least for styling references, conformity to a published style means that bibliographic citation managers, such as Zotero and OneNote, may be used without modifying the output. Despite the political implications of styling it open, if MW changes fan fic to fanfic, TWC will change its style. If MW changes Web site to website, TWC will change its style. Published standards result in pleasing stylistic conformity.* And they make the life of production personnel so, so much easier.

A shortened version of the new style appears in the instructions for authors on TWC’s Web site. The long version contains a lot of detailed information really only relevant to the production team. If we have done our jobs correctly, the edited documents will read so clearly that meaning is immediately evident, with no distracting errors: do regular readers of the journal even notice that we style it Web site? Didn’t think so.

In a well-edited document, the editing ought to be invisible. Standards are there to help that happen, and that’s why we follow them.

Endnote

* Most words we look up are compound words, not words we don’t know how to spell. Is a term one word, two words, or hyphenated? We need to know. The rule is, if a compound word is not in MW (the only dictionary used in the US academic publishing industry), it’s two words. TWC prefers to style most things always open; it usually isn’t confusing to omit a hyphen to indicate that the terms are linked.