See my article here, or read up on my boring story of how I got published below.
Also, yes, I know that the journal’s Style Guide is messed up. “Web site,” with a space, really guys?
Last spring, I sat down one night, shaken by an urge to write furiously. On a random whim, I wrote up a full paper for an academic journal.
Apparently this is what I do for fun in my free time.
The compensation: I’m finally published!
OK, so to put it all simply, I wrote a book review for the Transformative Works and Cultures journal. The TW&C journal is a peer-reviewed, open, online journal. If you hit the link, you can check out the amazing executive board. But in terms of my own publication, a book review is pretty low in the Important Publications hierarchy, but it’s a start, and definitely a good one for graduate students (though of course I haven’t even been accepted to a program yet…).
The interesting part of my book review is that it’s not actually a book review: it’s a website review! On the Online Submissions page, where it explains how and what to submit in the journal’s different sections, the review section states, “Reviews offer critical summaries of items of interest in the fields of fan and media studies, including books, new journals, and web sites.” That last item, websites, stuck out at me, so I flipped through the older four issues of the journal. I found only book reviews.
Idea: do something really new. So I wrote a website review!
The review takes a look at Inside Scanlation, a well-researched fan site that catalogues the short history of English-language manga scanlation. I discovered this website a couple weeks before it launched and eagerly waited for its official publication. I really like Inside Scanlation because it’s a modern equivalent of older anime fansites that probably are only available today via The Wayback Machine.
If you’re interested in reading through my review, you can find it at the Transformative Works and Cultures Journal, volume 5. A direct link to the article is here.
Also, if you’re interested in more anime fandom-related academic articles, Mikhail Koulikov wrote up a paper on fansubbing communities. You can read that essay in the same volume: Fighting the fan sub war: Conflicts between media rights holders and unauthorized creator/distributor networks.
