Large commit — rdoc update
More than 1000 lines of source code were added or removed in this commit.
General
Development
Community
An open-source project to develop a robust archiving system with social networking features for hosting fanfiction and other fan works. This software will be used to support the Archive Of Our Own, and we hope also other fan archives.
We welcome contributors, and one of our goals is to mentor new programmers from our fannish communities whom we hope will help maintain and improve the archive in the future, and also go on to work on other fannish projects. If you're interested in working with us, please contact volunteers@transformativeworks.org!
OTW-Archive and The Archive Of Our Own are projects of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit organization.
You can see the public roadmap for the design of this project at the OTW website on our project page.
This project is managed by cesy, elzj78, and Maia.
Tagged as
otw fanfiction fandom archiveofourown fanfic archive
Recent Highlights
Large commit — rdoc update
More than 1000 lines of source code were added or removed in this commit.
In commit 4fc590e9 by Sidra on 2012-04-21 (about 1 month ago)
Large commit — rdoc update
More than 1000 lines of source code were added or removed in this commit.
In commit fd0baf81 by Sidra on 2012-04-14 (about 1 month ago)
News
Links roundup for 21 May 2012
Posted 1 day ago by Claudia Rebaza
Here's a roundup of stories about fandom under pressure that might be of interest to fans:
In some of the latest takedown actions from the past month a fan offering free high-resolution downloads of his artwork for video game Fallout was
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contacted by a law firm representing the game owner Bethesda, issuing a cease and desist for his website. The artist replied in detail to the charges and has so far refused to turn his domain name over to the company, although he did remove links to the posters.
Popular website TV Tropes removed fanfiction recommendations on their site after encountering problems with Google's Ad Sense which required them to remove "mature and adult content" from the site. Aside from the issue of advertiser control of content, however, others were upset about what it meant for their use of the site. As one poster commented "The problem, as I see it, is that the admins have destroyed countless hours of our work. I don't demand that pages be restored onto this particular server, but I do demand that the source material (pages as they existed pre-cut) be made available in some fashion, so that those who want can host it elsewhere."
In many places, online access to content isn't affected by advertisers or corporate owners, but by governments. For example, Vietnamese authorities have recently mandated that Internet companies assist in online censorship. Among the provisions of a proposed decree, "Internet users 'are strictly prohibited' from providing fictitious personal data" which will prohibit all forms of anonymous blogging and discussion. Personal blogs will have to publicize the name and contact information of the individual responsible and will be held personally liable for all the published content on their blogs.
On the other hand at least one sports blogger is alarmed at the possibility that team owners might put important decisions in fans' hands. "As counter-intuitive as it sounds, as much as the Sixers should care about making the fans happy, they shouldn't care about what those fans want on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of a devastating losing streak. When they ask what the fans think about their roster, it isn't hip, catchy, or new-media savvy. It's insulting." Instead the blogger suggests, "continue to ask us what we think of a new lighting scheme, insist on our thoughts about a moose for a mascot, and call our home phones to ask how to make better use of '1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Sixers.' Those are the some of the best elements of a new fan-owner partnership."
If you have news of legal actions against fans or content takedowns, why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.
We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!
Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.
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Survey Sunday #1: ALL the questions
Posted 2 days ago by Claudia Rebaza
Welcome to our first Survey Sunday, where you will find a list of all questions asked in the OTW Community Survey. We introduced the idea in our previous post: we cannot release raw survey data to the public, but still want to give you the
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opportunity to interrogate that data. So from now through December, you can ask us questions relating to survey, and we'll try and dig up the answers.
The idea behind of posting this overview of all questions is that it enables you to ask combinations. A very conservative example: by cross-referencing questions #35 and #36 you get "Do people without prior wiki experience have trouble creating Fanlore articles?"
However, before you dig into the questions, please read our fine print so you know what to expect in terms of results:
Some results may be preliminary, due to the text answers not yet being included in the overall results (we will specify when this is the case).
We may already be planning to answer the inquiry in an upcoming update post: in that case we will let you know once it goes up.
Depending upon the volume of requests, we can't guarantee an answer within the two week period before the next Survey Sunday.
Depending upon which questions are being cross-tabulated, we may not be able to come up with a clear response.
And since we are still just starting to go through data, we may have to add to the above disclaimers as we go along and figure out what we can and can't do.
A note on survey structure, or: "why didn't I see question X when I took the survey?"
The survey used a ton of conditional questions – different answers led down different paths – so no-one saw the entirety of the survey. Conditional questions allowed respondents to skip anything irrelevant: if you tickied "Never heard of Fanlore", you didn't get any Fanlore questions but jumped straight to the "Fan Video project" section.
Another example: people who answered "Yes, I am an OTW member" weren't directed to "Have you ever donated to the OTW?", because becoming a member requires donating. Only non-members were asked if they ever donated.
Where to send your inquiries
We would like to ask for your queries and comments to be made at our website posts (no account needed) which you'll be able to find through http://transformativeworks.org/news-topic-tags/otw-sections/survey-research. We realize that people read OTW News through other sites and sources as well, but at the moment we cannot guarantee that we will see and answer your comment elsewhere due to technical constraints.
Our list of questions is below. We're looking forward to your queries!
OTW Community Survey: List of questions
The questions are listed in their order of appearance, but that doesn't necessarily reflect the way you took the survey because of the skip logic explained above.
The question types are either closed questions (yes/no or pre-defined answers), write-in fields (short replies), or boxes (essay-style replies). Basically, this means that closed questions will be easiest, and text boxes will take the longest to evaluate.
Demographics
What country/countries do you consider your home? type: write-in field
What is/are your native language/s? write-in field
What language/s do you use in fannish or fandom contexts? write-in field
Fannishness, fanworks, fan community
Do you consider yourself fannish / a fan? closed question
Where do you spend most of your fannish time? three write-in fields
If you consider yourself a member of fandom: how long have you been "in fandom"? numerical write-in field
Do you consume (watch, play, read...) fanworks? closed question + write-in field
Do you create fanworks? closed question + write-in field
What general fannish community/communities, if any, do you feel part of? text box
Archive of Our Own (AO3)
Have you ever used the Archive of Our Own (AO3)? closed question
Do you have an account at the Archive of Our Own? closed question
How efficient do you find the Archive's invitation system (invite queue or sending invites)? closed question
What are you using the Archive for? closed question + write-in field
Have you ever used the Archive's search function? closed question
How useful do you find the Archive's tagging system? closed question
How efficient is it to search and find works on the Archive? closed question
Did you find content in your fandom(s) on the Archive? closed question
Do you leave Kudos on works you like? closed question
Do you leave comments on works you like? closed question
How easy is it to leave comments? closed question
What are your reasons for not commenting on the Archive specifically? text box
How easy do you find it to create bookmarks on the Archive? closed question
How easy do you find it to use bookmarks on the Archive? closed question
How easy do you find it to post works to the Archive? closed question
How would you rate the ease-of-use of running a challenge? closed question
How would you rate the ease-of-use of participating in a challenge? closed question
Have you used the collections feature of the Archive? closed question
How easy do you find it to sort and find works within the collections? closed question
How easy do you find it to set up and maintain a collection? closed question
How do you like the look and feel of the Archive? closed question
How would you, personally, describe the Archive's atmosphere? text box
What is your favorite thing about the Archive, if any? text box
If you could change one thing about the Archive, what would it be? text box
Fanlore
Have you ever used the Fanlore Wiki? closed question
Do you have any wiki experience apart from Fanlore? closed question
How easy did you find creating or adding to articles on Fanlore initially? closed question
How comfortable do you feel adding content to Fanlore, in general? closed question
How comfortable do you feel expanding or correcting content created by others? closed question
If you have ever looked for content about your fandom(s) or your fannish culture on Fanlore: Did you find that content? closed question
When you are browsing Fanlore, which of the following navigation methods do you use? closed question + write-in field
How easy do you find searching and navigating Fanlore, in general? closed question
Are you clear on what kind of content is welcome on Fanlore? closed question
Have you ever needed assistance on Fanlore? closed question + write-in field
How useful did you find the help pages/tutorials? closed question
How easy do you find asking for assistance on Fanlore? closed question
How do you like the look and feel of Fanlore? closed question
What is your impression of the atmosphere on Fanlore? text box
What is your favorite thing about Fanlore, if any? text box
If you could change one thing about Fanlore, what would it be? text box
Fan Video and Multimedia Projects
Are you aware of the OTW's fan video projects? closed question
Which ones have you heard of? closed question + write-in field
How useful did you find these resources? closed question
Why were the resources not useful to you? How could we improve them? text box
Transformative Works and Cultures
Have you ever read Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) or its affiliated Symposium blog? closed question
If you have considered submitting an essay to TWC's Symposium section, or the Symposium blog, but hesitated to do so: What are your reasons? closed question+ write-in field
Legal Advocacy
Have you ever received a cease and desist letter, or had a fanwork removed from a site for intellectual property infringement? closed question
Are you aware of the OTW's legal advocacy work? closed question
This is a list of Legal Advocacy's contributions. Which ones have you heard of? closed question + write-in field
Do you feel that the OTW's legal advocacy had an impact on your fannish practice or your attitude towards the legality of fanworks? closed question
How has the OTW's legal advocacy work affected your fannish practice?(e.g. are you more/less confident, have you adopted terminology...) text box
How would you describe your previous attitude? closed question
How would you describe your current attitude? closed question
Open Doors
Are you interested in the preservation of at-risk fanworks and fannish projects? closed question
Are you aware of the option to "orphan" a fanwork on the Archive of Our Own? closed question
Have you designated someone as your "fannish next of kin" using the OTW's process? closed question
How easy did you find completing the "fannish next of kin" process? closed question
In the event that you could not maintain your fanzine collection any longer, would you consider donating it to the Fan Culture Preservation Project? closed question
Are you the maintainer of a fannish community web site, a fannish resource web site, or an archive? closed question
If you were unable to continue to maintain or preserve your site, would you consider asking Open Doors to help you preserve the site's content and history? closed question + write-in field
The OTW
Have you ever been an OTW member? closed question
How long have you been a member? closed question
What was your main reason for becoming a member? closed question + write-in field
What made you stop being a member? closed question + write-in field
What might make you choose to be a member in the future? closed question + write-in field
Have you ever donated to the OTW? closed question
How easy did you find the donation process? closed question
How did you first hear about the OTW? closed question
I first heard of the OTW by way of this project: closed question
The OTW hosts the following projects under its umbrella: closed question
Which OTW projects are most important to you? closed question
The OTW is represented on a variety of communication platforms. Which of these OTW online outlets have you read or heard of? closed question + write-in field
We post the following types of content to our OTW online outlets. Which ones are you interested in, generally speaking? closed question
What type of content would you like to see (more of) on the OTW online outlets? text box
OTW website
Have you read the OTW website (transformativeworks.org) before? closed question
Based on your previous visits to the OTW website (transformativeworks.org), how strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statements? The OTW website made it easy to find the information I was looking for / The OTW website is easy to navigate. / The OTW website met my expectations as a user. closed question
What should we improve about the website, in your opinion? text box
What information would you expect to find on the OTW website that's not currently there? text box
Do you have any other feedback about the OTW website? text box
Final question
Anything else you'd like to tell us? text box
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Links roundup for 19 May 2012
Posted 4 days ago by Claudia Rebaza
Here's a roundup of stories looking at transformative works that might be of interest to fans:
In this Tumblr blog post, the issue of transformative works is addressed directly and as with many Tumblr posts, the image conveys the message.
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Here, the subject is Johannes Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring holding a camera as if to take a picture of her painter or the viewer. "[T]ransformative work, intratextual work, is most emphatically not a new thing, nor a creatively barren thing. It’s awesome. And this image here is delicious, because it takes that lovely painting, in which the model is mysterious, alluring, her parted lips gleaming and her eyes wide as she looks out at the viewer, objectified - and it drags it straight into the 21st century by adding the camera, making it into that recognisable MySpace pose, making her the CREATOR of the image not just the object. She is looking at herself, not at us, and this careful composition becomes an ephemeral snapshot, a fleeting moment in her day."
University of Utah English professor Anne Jamison was profiled as a scholar of fan fiction after the course she taught on it became attached to discussions surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey. "Focusing her scholarly eye to the phenomenon was a departure from the norm for the 42-year-old professor, a native of Albany, N.Y. Yet fan fiction fed her longtime interests in female writers and genre fiction, and she’s in the process of compiling and editing articles for a scholarly anthology on the topic. 'I told everyone I knew that [fan fiction] is a global connective of housewives and professional women exchanging erotica and writing advice online,' she said. 'Everyone yawned. I thought it was very interesting.'"
Other higher education coursework also addresses the existence of fanworks. In a recap of vidding that included citations from the OTW's Rebecca Tushnet, one student concluded "Despite the forces of money, law, technical challenges and the fans’ need to interact with the shows and characters that they love, vidding was born and continues to thrive. The fan communities and their pursuits are supported by the efforts of those, like Lessig and Tushnet, who fight for a better environment for remix culture. Over the months and years to come, I look forward to enjoying the stories and perspectives of fan culture in these kind of vids, and monitoring progress in the fight to allow them to do it."
If you make fan vids, write fan fiction or create fan art, why not write about it on Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.
We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!
Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.
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Urgent! Fortunecity.com free sites deleted
Posted 5 days ago by Claudia Rebaza
Fanlore is appealing for help in an urgent effort to assist fans affected by the disappearance of free sites on FortuneCity, an early Internet website provider that hosted many personal fanfic websites and small archives due to its free accounts. In
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conjunction with the more clearly communicated Geocities fadeout a few years ago, this action on Fortunecity's part has meant the loss of another chunk of fannish history.
Fanlore is hosting the website addresses of the now deleted sites. Knowing the addresses to old sites gives fans searching for them a chance to recover and access the content once held there by going through the Wayback Machine.
A Google spreadsheet has been started so that volunteers can "claim a fandom, read the instructions...and pitch in."
Although an email was sent to account holders, many of the addresses tied to those accounts are no longer valid or are no longer frequently used by the maintainers. In addition many fans did not see an announcement banner because it was placed with the site ads, which many users have blocked while visiting the site.
The effort to document the URLs of the missing pages is urgent because they are currently stored by Google, but Google deletes its cached records in a short time if a webpage disappears or changes. This is why many typing fingers are needed, to record those addresses before they disappear from search results.
If you can help, please do the following:
1) Sign up on the Google spreadsheet for particular fandoms. Follow the instructions to record the addresses.
2) Contact Fanlore if you need help with the project, or want to submit addresses but do not have a Fanlore account (use Fanlore's contact page here: http://transformativeworks.org/contact/fanlore%20gardeners and put "FortuneCity help!" in the subject line)
If you are an author or artist whose work was deleted by FortuneCity, we would welcome it on the Archive of Our Own. If you need an invitation to upload your work there, contact AO3 Support via our support form and put "FortuneCity content" in the summary line.
Please do what you can to help rescue these lost works!
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Announcing Survey Sunday!
Posted 6 days ago by Jintian
To everyone following news on the OTW's Survey we conducted last month, we wanted to not only provide you with some more results, but also lay out our plan going forward in terms of
1) What we can release;
2) How quickly we can release
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it;
3) What sort of schedule you can expect.
Last week's post, OTW Community Survey: First results, was only a stopgap release while we were putting together a plan for not only dealing with the data, but also figuring out a sustainable schedule for releasing the information as this involves volunteers from various committees as well as coordination between Internationalization & Outreach, which developed the survey, and Communications which will be working on the public posts. In addition to releasing the information publicly, the survey workgroup is working on creating data reports for the internal use of its various committees. And since, as with all OTW projects, we are dependent on the time our volunteers and staffers can make available, the work is more likely to progress in fits and starts than in a consistent way every week.
To that end, we wanted to introduce what we're calling...
Survey Sunday
Survey Sunday will take place every two weeks now through December, and will allow anyone interested to ask their own questions which can be answered with our big pile of data!
We've had a few suggestions to release the survey data set publicly so that the survey analysis can be crowdsourced. However, one of our primary considerations when putting together this survey was ensuring the privacy of our respondents; as such, we decided to release only aggregate data this time around (those of you who took the survey may remember that this was part of the commitment we made in our disclosure statement). Specifically, the statement promised to survey takers that information would only be released in the aggregate (with the exception of specific, anonymous quotes) and that individual responses would be available only to OTW staff and volunteers. (All those people who have access to the data have signed a confidentially agreement which restricts them from discussing the survey contents with anyone outside of the workgroup, including anyone else in the OTW.)
However, we also realize that people are curious to find out specific data given the large number of responses we received, and we want to fulfill those wishes. So to that end, we are going to be offering a regular forum where people can make those requests, and we will turn around and attempt to answer them by the next posting date. We have to include a few disclaimers though, such as:
1) Some results may be preliminary, due to the text answers not yet being included in the overall results (we will specify when this is the case).
2) We may already be planning to answer the inquiry in an upcoming update post: in that case we will let you know once it goes up.
3) Depending upon the volume of requests, we can't guarantee an answer within the two week period before the next Survey Sunday.
4) Depending upon which questions are being cross-tabulated, we may not be able to come up with a clear response.
And since we are still just starting to go through data, we may have to add to the above disclaimers as we go along and figure out what we can and can't do.
A look at our process
In the interests of offering regular updates on the survey data, we won't be publishing data in the order it originally appeared in the survey. Instead, we'll publish the results out of order, based on how quickly they are processed, and we'll sometimes give you some preliminary data (for example, data which doesn't factor in written-in results) while the more complex data is being processed. We think that this will ensure you can be more involved in the process, and can ask questions and discuss the results as they emerge instead of waiting for us to produce one big report.
Not only will different types of questions take different time & effort to evaluate, but different people from the survey workgroup volunteered for different sets of questions, depending on interest and skill set. This spreads out work, but it also means not everyone is available at the same time or can work at the same speed. (In other words, welcome to volunteering at the OTW!)
Here's an example from the first section of the survey, which covered "demographics & fandom-related questions."
1. What country/countries do you consider your home?
You might think these answers would be simple to sort but that isn't always the case. Geographic information isn't viewed by all people in the same way, so there isn't any single way to report it, although the linked graph above was put together to give us at least an initial look.
To analyse this question, the first step was to filter out duplicate results that were clearly typos - "United Kindgom" and "UK" are fairly clearly the same place. The next step was the tricky cases - grouping certain countries together can seem more controversial to one person than another, and the names used may also be important. Kudos to the person who justified writing Texas as their home country by giving the years it was independent, but sorry, we're counting that as part of the USA for these stats. In most other cases, for the purpose of the graph countries were grouped together where there were doubts for the purposes of creating an initial top 10 (e.g. 8% for Canada includes Quebec).
But this data could also be put in graphs in different ways which yield other problems: what would be considered a continental area? And this could separate data -- La Reunion is in a different continent from France. We'd like to do more analysis of the second and third countries people listed, and we've got a world map that we're going to update with the full data at some point, but that requires us to re-do that analysis to match the countries the mapping software uses.
2. What is/are your native language/s?
This was another write-in answer, and its 6844 replies need more filtering & categorizing.
7. Do you consume (watch, play, read...) fanworks?
This is relatively simple at first glance (that's why we picked this for inclusion in our first post), but there were a number of write-in responses that will have to be added into the final results.
9. What general fannish community/communities, if any, do you feel part of?
About the most challenging question from an analsyis perspective, apart from the big essay-style ones. Because this question predictably yielded extremely disparate answers, we need to figure out how to group and classify them meaningfully. While this is perhaps one of the most interesting answers to see the results to, unfortunately it's not likely to be finished very soon.
How will the survey results affect the OTW's future?
The survey was designed for two reasons. First, it would provide us information on our members, users, and people aware of the OTW. Second, this information would help us develop policies and procedures for the organization and its projects. For this reason, we are simultaneously creating survey results for the use of our committees and workgroups. However, this work is likely to proceed at the same pace as the public survey results, so it is likely to be many months before committees have all the information pertinent to them. We see the survey as one of the OTW's major projects for this term, and its data likely won't be incorporated and implemented until next year.
However, we expect to communicate these effects publicly once the project concludes and all parts of the org have a chance to provide input and reactions to the data. This may be done in conjunction with the strategic plan. The simple answer is that we don't have a set date for this yet, but it will be part of the project's conclusion.
Sharing data
We know that people will probably be keen to reblog and share the information we put out. The aggregate data that we publish through OTW news channels may be freely reblogged, shared, linked to, etc. If you post about the data, please provide a link back to the OTW website (survey reports can be found through: http://transformativeworks.org/news-topic-tags/otw-sections/survey-research) so that people can find more information about it, and ask their own questions.
What happens next?
Our first Survey Sunday will kick off this weekend, on May 20 (or 21 for some of our readers). We will begin by posting the full list of questions in the survey. This will enable anyone who either did or didn't take the survey to see what interests them and start coming up with suggestions for results they'd like to see.
We would like to ask for comments to be made at our website posts (no account needed) which you'll be able to find through http://transformativeworks.org/news-topic-tags/otw-sections/survey-research. We realize that people read OTW News through other sites and sources as well and it would be more convenient to comment through those sources. However there are several reasons why we'd prefer not to gather comments through them for this project. The first is that not all sites that receive our news feed are being actively posted to, rather the posting has been automated. The OTW currently has eight different outlets just for OTW-News (not counting additional sites/sources for AO3, Fanlore news, OTW Tag Wranglers, etc.) While most of these sites are set up to deliver responses to our Communications Committee we have been having technical problems caused by spam blacklisting that mean that some messages do not get delivered from all sites, and some sites like Twitter are currently not getting delivered at all. Our Systems team is working on solutions for this but in the meantime, to be certain your comment gets seen, please make it at our website. This also saves time for the survey workgroup team in rounding up your comments.
Thank you for your patience as we work on this project. We welcome your input and look forward to sharing exciting developments from the results with you soon.
In the meantime, here are a few more graphs we have pulled together from data where we have complete results:
Results: Graphs for questions #54,#56,#70,#71
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