Abbreviation | OTW |
---|---|
Formation | 17 May 2007 [1] |
Type | non-profit |
Main organ | board of directors, elected annually |
Website | www |
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit, fan activist organization. Its mission is to serve fans by preserving and encouraging transformative fan activity, known as "fanwork", and by making fanwork widely accessible. [2]
OTW advocates for the transformative, legal, and legitimate nature of fan labor activities, including fan fiction, fan videos, fan art, anime music videos, podfic (audio recordings of fan fiction [3] ), and real person fiction. [4] [5] Its vision is to nurture fans and fan culture, and to protect fans' transformative work from legal snafus and commercial exploitation. [2] [6]
OTW has 1,010 volunteers, net assets of $2.5 million and at least 15,810 paying members according to its annual report in 2021. [7]
The Organization for Transformative Works offers the following services and platforms to fans in a myriad of fandoms:
The OTW provides legal assistance to the fandom community, addressing the legal issues with fan fiction and other fan works. Rebecca Tushnet, a noted legal scholar on fanfiction and fair use in copyright and trademark law, works with the OTW's legal project. In 2008, the OTW (in coordination with the Electronic Frontier Foundation) successfully submitted requests to the Library of Congress for further exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the fair use of video clips for certain noncommercial uses such as video remixes, commentary, and education, as well as to protect technology used for such purposes. The exceptions were also successfully renewed in 2012 and expanded in 2015. [12] [13] [14] The OTW, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and New Media Rights submitted a new petition for exemptions in 2018. [15]
The OTW has also submitted several amicus briefs to the courts in several cases involving intellectual property law:
The OTW has also instituted several projects for preserving fan history and culture. One such project was the creation of Fanlore, a wiki for preserving fandom history. The Fanlore wiki was first revealed in beta in 2008, with a full release in December 2010. [18] In June 2018, there were approximately 45,000 articles and 800,000 edits to the wiki, [19] and it passed a million edits in January 2021. [20]
The OTW also has several "Open Doors" projects dedicated to the preservation of fannish historical artifacts. These projects include The Fan Culture Preservation Project, a joint venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa [21] to archive and preserve fanzines and other non-digital forms of fan culture, and The GeoCities Rescue Project, which attempted to preserve content originally hosted on Yahoo's GeoCities by transferring that content to new locations on the Archive of Our Own or within the Fanlore wiki. [22] Other miscellaneous artifacts and collections are stored on the OTW's main servers in the Special Collections gallery.
Created by the OTW, the Archive of Our Own (often shortened to AO3) is an open-source, non-commercial, non-profit archive for fan fiction and other transformative fanwork. The Archive is built and run entirely by volunteers, many without previous coding experience. [23] The Archive was publicly launched into open beta on 14 November 2009, [24] and has been growing steadily since. [25]
Time magazine included Archive of Our Own on its list of "50 Best Websites 2013". Time said that AO3 "serves all fandoms equally, from The A-Team to Zachary Quinto and beyond", and also called it "the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web...". [26]
Fans post, tag and categorize their own works on AO3. [27] Volunteer "tag wranglers" link similar tags so readers can search for works in the categories and types they want. [28] The tagging system allows easy compilation of statistics (stats).
Fan fiction ranges in length, from fewer than one thousand words (flash fiction, or one-hundred-word drabbles) to novel-length works, up to millions of words in length. According to an article on fandom statistics published on The Daily Dot newspaper in 2013, AO3 hosts more very short works than long ones, but readers prefer the longer works. The average very short story received fewer than 150 hits, while novel-length works are more likely to receive around 1,500 hits. [29]
A writer who posts a story on AO3 can record its word count on the story's header, along with other information such as the story's fandom, ships, and other tropes. Some fan works are 'crossovers' that draw on two or more universes or characters. Writers can also note if their story is finished or a work in progress (WIP). [30]
As of 2018, the archive hosts more than 4.2 million works in more than 30,000 fandoms. [31] Destination Toast, fan and statistician, [32] compiles and analyzes fandom statistics, especially stats from Archive of Our Own, which she says is "the most easily searchable archive I know of." [33] In January 2016, she posted "2015: A (Statistical) Year in Fandom." It includes statistics from two other large fan fiction archives, FanFiction.Net (FFN) and Wattpad as well as the popular microblog platform Tumblr. The post shows that the most active fandoms on AO3 in 2015 were (largest first) Supernatural , Dragon Age , Harry Potter , The Avengers, Teen Wolf , and Sherlock . [34] Other media sources include movies, television shows, and books including The Lord of the Rings , Doctor Who, and The Hunger Games .
A fandom is a subculture composed of fans characterized by a feeling of camaraderie with others who share a common interest. Fans typically are interested in even minor details of the objects of their fandom and spend a significant portion of their time and energy involved with their interest, often as a part of a social network with particular practices, differentiating fandom-affiliated people from those with only a casual interest.
Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex. While the term "slash" originally referred only to stories in which male characters are involved in an explicit sexual relationship as a primary plot element, it is now also used to refer to any fan story containing a romantic pairing between same-sex characters. Many fans distinguish slash with female characters as a separate genre, commonly referred to as femslash.
Kirk/Spock, commonly abbreviated as K/S or Spirk and referring to James T. Kirk and Spock from Star Trek, is a popular pair in slash fiction, possibly the first slash pairing, according to Henry Jenkins, an early slash fiction scholar. Early in the history of Star Trek fan fiction, a few fan writers started writing about a romantic and sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock, highlighting a romantic or sexual element to the friendship between the men. As of 1998, most academic studies on slash fiction focused on Kirk/Spock, as Star Trek was by that point one of the longest-lived and most prosperous subjects of slash fiction, while its mainstream popularity made it one of the most accessible titles for academics and their audience. As the first slash pairing, K/S was created and developed largely independently from the influence of other slash fiction, with most of the conventions of the slash genre seeing their debut first in K/S slash.
Fanspeak is the slang or jargon current in science fiction and fantasy fandom, especially those terms in use among readers and writers of science fiction fanzines.
SMOF is an acronym which stands for "Secret Master(s) Of Fandom" and is a term used within the science fiction fan community. Its coining is generally attributed to long-time science fiction fan and author Jack L. Chalker.
Fanfiction has encountered problems with intellectual property law due to usage of copyrighted characters without the original creator or copyright owner's consent.
MediaWest*Con is one of the largest and longest running media-based fan-run conventions in the United States. It is held annually over Memorial Day weekend in Lansing, Michigan. The convention emerged in the late 1970s, beginning as T'Con in 1978 and 2'Con in 1979 before taking on the name MediaWest*Con in 1981. The convention remains the world's largest gathering of Fanzine writers, artists, and publishers, and for decades was the event where most new science fiction and fantasy Fanzines were released. The annual "Fan Quality Awards" for Fanzine excellence, known as the "Fan Q's", have been given out at MediaWest*Con since 1981. In addition, the convention's art show has been the principal location for the display and sale of published Fanzine art and illustrations.
Vidding is a fan labor practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources, thereby exploring the source itself in a new way. The creator may choose video clips in order to focus on a single character, support a particular romantic pairing between characters, criticize or celebrate the original text, or point out an aspect of the TV show or film that they find under-appreciated. The resulting video may then be shared via one or more social media outlets and online video platforms such as YouTube. The creators refer to themselves as "vidders"; their product as "vids", "fanvids", "fanvideos", "songvids", or the more recently adopted name "edits"; and the act itself is referred to as vidding.
Fan labor, also called fan works, are the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works, visual or computer-assisted art, films and videos, animations, games, music, or applied arts and costuming.
Fan art or fanart is artwork created by fans of a work of fiction and derived from a series character or other aspect of that work. As fan labor, fan art refers to artworks that are neither created nor (normally) commissioned or endorsed by the creators of the work from which the fan art derives.
Fan fiction or fanfiction is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from the original creator(s) as a basis for their writing. Fan fiction ranges from a couple of sentences to an entire novel, and fans can retain the creator's characters and settings, add their own, or both. It is a form of fan labor. Fan fiction can be based on any fictional subject. Common bases for fan fiction include novels, movies, comics, television shows, musical groups, cartoons, anime, manga, and video games.
Transformative Works and Cultures is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. The journal collects essays, articles, book reviews, and shorter pieces that concern fandom, fanworks, and fan practices. According to Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), the journal "supports the [Organization for Transformative Works's] mission to promote the legitimacy and sustainability of non-commercial fan creativity by providing a forum for innovative criticism in fan studies, broadly conceived."
The Ditmar Award has been awarded annually since 1969 at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention to recognise achievement in Australian science fiction and science fiction fandom. The award is similar to the Hugo Award but on a national rather than international scale.
Rebecca Tushnet is an American legal scholar. She serves as the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School. Her scholarship focuses on copyright, trademark, First Amendment, and false advertising.
A doujinshi convention is a type of event dedicated to the sale of doujinshi, or self-published books. These events are known in Japanese as doujin sokubaikai or doujinshi sokubaikai. Thousands of doujinshi conventions take place in Japan every year. Doujinshi conventions can also be found in some other countries.
Archive of Our Own is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users. The site was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works and went into open beta in 2009 and continues to be in beta. As of 1 March 2024, Archive of Our Own hosts 12,600,000 works in over 63,880 fandoms including those related to real people. The site has received generally positive reception for its curation, organization, and design, mostly done by readers and writers of fanfiction.
Kristina Dorothea Busse is a professor in the Philosophy department at the University of South Alabama. As the co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures, her research focuses on fanfiction communities and fan culture. Alongside fandom academics Alexis Lothian and Robin Anne Reid, she coined the term "queer female space" in 2007.
Francesca Coppa is an American scholar whose research has encompassed British drama, performance studies and fan studies. In English literature, she is known for her work on the British writer Joe Orton; she edited several of his early novels and plays for their first publication in 1998–99, more than thirty years after his murder, and compiled an essay collection, Joe Orton: A Casebook (2003). She has also published on Oscar Wilde. In the fan-studies field, Coppa is known for documenting the history of media fandom and, in particular, of fanvids, a type of fan-made video. She co-founded the Organization for Transformative Works in 2007, originated the idea of interpreting fan fiction as performance, and in 2017, published the first collection of fan fiction designed for teaching purposes. As of 2021, Coppa is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania.
Fan studies is an academic discipline that analyses fans, fandoms, fan cultures and fan activities, including fanworks. It is an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, which emerged in the early 1990s as a separate discipline, and draws particularly on audience studies and cultural studies.
Fallout: Equestria is a post-apocalyptic fan fiction novel based on the Fallout and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series. It was originally published by pseudonymous user Kkat on April 12, 2011. It is split into five volumes, totalling 620,000 words across more than 2,000 pages. The novel has been published as an ebook, an audiobook, and also as a physical hardcover novel. The novel is considered to be one of the most popular My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanworks, having developed a large following of its own.
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