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I've been working on my conference notes this morning, and I'll be posting the notes for Friday in a bit (I'm sure you're all on tenterhooks) but a few signal boosts for Grate Fandom first:

thdancingferret is in need, and fandom's holding an auction to help her out, starting May 30th. They're looking both for people to donate items/fic/art and people who wish to buy such things. More info here. (thanks mercurtin!)

In happier news, paragraphs is attending Armadillocon in Austin in August, and looking for someone to share her room with. I can vouch for her as someone who will definitely not axe-murder you.

I cannot, on the other hand, vouch for there being anything desireable about being in Austin in August. :D

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I finally sat down with my notes from the conference and went through them today, because I wanted to be a little more coherent about everything than I could while I was actually in the conference. Ironically, I took longhand notes; I think I was about the only person doing it, but I've developed a very specific method of note-taking over the years and it requires not only unlined paper but the freedom to skip around and draw diagrams and columns if I need to.

Re-reading my notes and providing context turned out to take a really long time and a whole lot of words, so I'm kind of breaking it up a bit; I managed to get through Friday today, and I'll probably work on Saturday tomorrow. I did want to talk about some themes that leapt out at me, because while I can't be sure they were themes for the conference they did tend to stretch over the sessions I attended:

-- Print media versus online media. Print media is seen as much more legitimate, for a number of good and bad reasons; this isn't a conscious critical analysis people make, but a very deeply ingrained assumption they have. There's no anti-online-media sentiment to it, precisely, but simply the unconscious privileging of print over digital.

-- Digital structures influence behaviour. This gets a bit into territory where a lot of people roll their eyes, but I think it's legitimate. The wording and structure of websites and programs encourages certain kinds of behaviour, with both positive and negative results.

-- Single and multiple-author modes. There was a strong sentiment among the presenters that the concept of a Single "Solitary Genius" Author is on its way out. Authors who do work alone (for a given value of "alone" that includes research materials and the usual peer input) are seen as either being more accessible or having to be more accessible in order to continue to function in modern scholarship and publishing. Academia seems more interested in multiple-author works like Wikipedia and collaborative storytelling similar to what happens in online RPGs and MMORGs. There's a hint of "omg a meme!" to this as well, in the study of how viral media is spread through internet culture.

All of these things visibly impact the work that I'm doing. I do unconsciously place more value on print media, because I charge for it, whereas most of my digital texts are cheap or free, especially the early drafts. I've also talked a lot with people about how to recreate my process -- heavy reader participation and peer review -- which somewhat falls under the heading of digital structure, since the Livejournal format is one of the few where it could really work. And of course multiple-author modes are of interest to me because I don't create in a vacuum, I don't even pretend to; user input has been vital in making my work what it is, but dealing with that and uniting multiple users under a single guiding artistic voice is both complex and worthy of study. Intriguingly, the latter is something people have really neglected to talk about, perhaps because it's not very widely used -- places like Wikipedia have moderators and super-active users, but there is no single guiding hand for any given area, nothing to discern value in multiple threads and unite it into a coherent whole, which is kind of what I do with my work. You can argue all you like, but in the Samipedia, I decide who lives and dies what goes in the final cut.

The conference properly opened on Thursday with workshops and the Graduate Research Network, which I didn't attend; I knew I'd be getting in late on Wednesday night, so I didn't bother signing up. I did hang out with the GRN folks for a while at breakfast, because otherwise there was nowhere to sit -- meals were included with the conference, but breakfast was a kind of continental buffet affair, and they didn't really set up seating for it. I met some nice people, teachers mostly, and then when the GRN was starting I quietly left and went on walkabout for the day.

( Friday morning: Town Hall and Low Attendance. )

( First Panel: Legitimate Media and Digital Structures, part one )

( Second Panel: Digital Archives and Unbooks/Extribulum )

( Third Panel: Lots Of Fannish Scholarship )

So, to sum Friday up: Intense, informative, and occasionally difficult, but very satisfying. There was definitely some "settling in" for me on Friday -- relearning how to take concise notes, how to listen to scholarly work, and how to deal with both bad performances and self-absorbed audiences.

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THIS IS MY NEW SHOWER CURTAIN.



NOW I WILL NEVER GET LOST WHEN TAKING THE EL FROM MY BATHROOM.

It is without a doubt the most awesome thing in my bathroom, possibly in my entire apartment.

Shut up, trains are cool.