( Nothing about us without us: accessible programming and well-meaning developers )|

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Signal boosting from just about everywhere:

Stacy Whitman (slwhitman), freelance editor and fellow Simmons Center for the Study of Children's Literature grad, is trying to start a new publishing company. Tu Publishing will be "a small, independent multicultural SFF press for children and YA." I can't even find words to talk about how wonderful this is, or how much this project is needed. You know what really sticks in my craw? Telling the students in my fantasy and science fiction class that my syllabus, with its pathetic selection of authors and characters of color, is not representative of the genre as a whole because my syllabus is more diverse.

Tu Publishing will only get off the ground if it gets enough funding. The startup is currently trying to get funding through Kickstarter, where you pledge to donate money to help them get off the ground. Pledges are only paid if the project launches, and people who pledge can get coupons, ARCs, etc.. If their funding drive works, they'll start accepting manuscripts in January.

Their submission guidelines say they are accepting books along the following guidelines: "Our first two books will be fantasy or science fiction, and we’ll specifically be looking for books that feature characters of color, characters from minority or non-Western cultures, and/or non-Western/minority cultures. That’s pretty broad — it could be Japanese or Jamaican, Alaskan Inuit or African American settings and/or characters. We won’t be looking for books where race is necessarily the issue–just really great novels that will entertain readers from 7 to 18." Though the guidelines don't specifically encourage authors of color, there is nothing about Stacy's or the Tu Publishing website that leads me to believe the house would ever say "thanks, but we already have an Asian author on our list."

If in one year, we get two presses dedicated to science fiction and fantasy from underrepresented communities (because don't forget about Verb Noire), that is a fabulous thing to have happen.

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For Disability Blog Carnival #59: Disability and Work:

Liz Henry tells us that October is Disability Employment Awareness Month in the United States. Who knew? I guess this is why my university's human resources newsletter this month has an article called "Accommodating Our Valuable Employees", all about the wonderful ways in which the human resources department jumps through hoops to adapt the environment for employees with disabilities. Someday I have to meet this department of which they write. </snark>

Anyway, I've written plenty on the frustrations of being a working person with disabilities, but I wanted to talk about some of the ways in which it's actually pretty awesome. ( Even I can't complain all the time. )</

Tomorrow I'm going to be teaching Virginia Hamilton's The Magical Adventure's of Pretty Pearl (alongside Donna Jo Napoli's Breath and Robin McKinley's Beauty), and I have to admit I'm somewhat terrified, as a white instructor in front of a classroom of (apparently) all white students. It's such a complicated book, and I just don't feel like I have the qualification or training to deal with the text's complications, such as its valorization of the mammy figure, or the way it presents phonetically spelled-out dialect. This is doubly complicated for me by some of Hamilton's own writings on the language. When she talks about it, she acts as if she's inventing a dialect out of whole cloth, albeit somewhat researched: She does identify her research here, and as a complete ignoramus even I recognize certain vocabulary and dialect in Pretty Pearl having origins in Gullah, not made up entirely. But she self-identifies as an outsider to this folklore and language: And then there are all the mammy issues, which in her own writing and talking about the book Hamilton identifies as strongly feminist, and I feel like my basic fandom/Internet-culture course in Intersectionality 101 hasn't prepared me for this. I feel like I need at least Intersectionality 201, and I probably need more historical context that I have.

You know how Zora Neale Hurston took a lot of crap for writing down oral traditions and making them available to white people? The more I prepare for this class, the more I feel like this is the kind of story which is a beautiful reworking of oral traditions for insiders, but in clumsy (my?) hands can just reinforce stereotypes among outsiders. I'm sure I don't have enough knowledge of musical history to be sufficiently lucid about the gorgeous call and response patterns the book evokes. I have only an academic knowledge of the John de Conquer stories, and though I was brought up on John Henry picture books like many American kids, they were decontextualized from their racial and class history, tossed in a pile with Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox and Johnny Appleseed. I've been spending the evening reading selections from Alan Dundes' 1973 Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, and the very fact that I've been finding so many of these incredibly dated essays (many from the 1930s) informative is excessively worrying.

I'm starting to think I'm not smart enough to teach Virginia Hamilton. Last year I tried to teach Justice and Her Brothers. It's bad enough that the book makes no sense without the rest of the Justice cycle. I find that trilogy too difficult for me under any circumstances. I hoped that teaching it my students might bring some insights to it but they were fairly hostile and I felt too dense about the whole thing to bring any deeper understanding.

And yet at the same time, the more I read children's literature critics discussing Virginia Hamilton, the more uncomfortable I am with their overall treatment of her. Not because it's not deserved -- Hamilton is an artist, an author who writes beautiful books that frequently made me feel like a complete idiot because they are so rich and complicated. But because the towering pedestal on which Hamilton's work is placed in the context of decades lacking any critical praise for any other black writer of children's and young adult novels feels, well, icky. How much of the praise for Hamilton's work acts as a Band-Aid making people think it's unnecessary to confront the absence of critically praised black American writers for children? Yet by raising this question, am I implying the Virginia Hamilton has received praise she hasn't deserved? Because that's not what I mean at all.

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Over at the DCA blog (RSS/tufts_dca_feed on DW/tufts_dca on LJ), I've posted asking people for their favorite reference books. Come and tell us!

I was a little bit disingenuous over there when I said that the OED was my second favorite reference book. Really, the OED is my favorite reference book, because it is best for party tricks. I do love my Debrett's Peerage, and probably the only reason that DARE doesn't come first is that it is not complete. But where else but the OED can you easily find the connection between "cool" and "aftermath"?

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Is there any particular reason that archival collection management tools, vendor provided or open source, are all ridiculously inaccessible? I mean, Proficio appears to have gone entirely out of its way to rewrite a widget set in order to avoid Windows APIs on its Windows-only product, thus rendering it completely mouse driven. Archivist's Toolkit, you are designed in academia with public funding, and you don't even mention the word "accessibility" on your website. And most of the other collection management databases I've tested are just as bad. Would a little bit of keyboard-driveability or non-graphical navigation really kill you?

I mean, I'm not asking everybody to have Moodle's stance on accessibility, but... who am I kidding. I am absolutely asking you all to have Moodle's stance on accessibility.

Remember that time I burst into tears in a meeting because of development manager said "we can't make these decisions thinking about the 3% of our users who have accessibility needs" and I shouted "those 3% are ME, your coworker, sitting right here"? That's how I feel today. It's my job to test the software. It's my job to make recommendations to my coworkers about what product we should be using. And I can't use it.

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I've been enjoying Public Knowledge's 4-part video series "We Are Creators, Too," but I never expected Francesca Coppa discussing vidding to come across my blog roll!

Kudos to PK for treating vidding like any other form of video remix, not as some weird dysfunctional female behaviour. And kudos to PK for doing the shockingly unusual behaviour of not normativizing male video creation; 3 of the 4 interviews are with women, and video remix not treated as a male activity that some women do as well.

And of course, kudos to Francesca for for an excellent interview which touches on so many of the key points of vidding culture, history, and law.

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• children's books by and about people of color published in the United States: statistics gathered by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education


• karenhealey made a great post about getting cultural consultants when writing about cultures other than her own -- specifically writing as Pākehā about Māori culture. She doesn't ask for a cookie, she doesn't explain to everybody why she is sure that she got it right. She just explains her process of trying to do things in a way which is honest and respectful. She acknowledges that she might have screwed up, she'd knowledges that she is worried about it. It's a fascinating post.


• Karen is also the author of one of my other open tabs, a column on Strange Horizons entitled " Where the Popular Kids Are Sitting", about the incredibly healthy young adult speculative fiction market. (This reminds me of another one of my open tabs, which I'm not going to close, and to which I will link although only those of you with Project Muse Access will be able to read the full text: The Lion and the Unicorn's review of two books exploring the phenomenon of young adult/adult crossover fiction.)

And this one isn't linkspam. Regarding some snide comments made by Richard Peck, Roger Sutton asks "What do you do when your favorite author turns out to be a puppy kicker?" it's really interesting that it was Richard Peck who provoked the question, because before I heard Richard Peck speak several years ago, I always would have said "Eh, whatever. I can distinguish the author from his or her works." But after this particular talk of Peck's, in which he revealed his immense loathing of modernity, teachers, adults, non-old-fashioned children, technology, and pretty much everything that departs from his romantic vision of early 20th century America, I discovered I could no longer read his books without seeing that loathing shaping every word. It's not that the author kicked puppies, it's that after I discovered his puppy-kicking tendencies I realized that all of his books were about how awesome it is to kick puppies.

I think that's why I can still read Orson Scott Card (at least the good stuff, which is the vast minority). Card himself is a master puppy kicker, but a fair number of his earlier books are actually about how people who kick puppies kind of suck, and puppies are going to grow to be dogs and isn't that awesome? On the other hand, I have a difficult time enjoying Spider Robinson anymore ever since I read an essay of his, realized that he idolized Robert Heinlein and Heinlein's screwed up gender politics, and then started seeing those screwed up gender politics in everything Robinson wrote.

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I'm trying to close out many of my tabs, so I'm going to break this into two posts, one which is mostly about archival/open scholarship/library issues, and one which is about children's literature -- because I think my readership is kind of divided down the middle.

"diaries are a window into life of Kennedy daughter" was a story which really resonated with me as I struggle to learn the ethics of archivists. On the one hand, the diaries are an important part of the historical record, teaching us incredibly troubling things about Joe Kennedy in giving insights into many of the causes supported by Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. On the other hand, their potential for harm to (at the time) living people was not small.

• "Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers to the Public" : closing the loopholes in copyright law which might make GPL and Creative Commons-type licenses unenforceable


• "Newsflash: professor visits library" really gets at the heart of the problem libraries have, from my perspective, which is an utter failure of advertising. I don't know how many times people have told me about this great new service that allows them to e-mail or text in a question and get an answer back.


• Peter Sefton's comments on trying to understand Elsevier's license terms are truly hysterical.

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My previous post made me think more about representations of fatness of the books on my syllabus. When I counted, I came up with three fat protagonists:

1. Wilbur from Charlotte's Web: Obviously problematic, because he's a pig. On the other hand, Wilbur's love of food is presented positively -- but it's presented positively because he's a pig. Templeton's greediness and ensuing fatness are presented grotesquely, both in text and illustration. On the whole, the text in its own way fairly didactic about eating and exercise habits being species appropriate. Charlotte is supposed to be bloodthirsty, Wilbur is supposed to like eating slops, and Fern is supposed to eat cotton candy occasionally while writing the ferris wheel with Henry Fussy. On the whole, I'd call this book kinda kinda in its representation of fatness, leaning on the negative side because hey, Wilbur, pig.

2. Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit: Once again, not a human character. Now, this book clearly trades in standard stereotypes of fatness, in the character of Bombur, who is amusingly bumbling and fat, and whose weight frequently leads to him getting stuck in funny funny fat conundrums. Oh how funny! Funny fat Bombur! But aside from that, it's also got interesting representations of food and exercise and fatness. Gandalf and the dwarves -- heroes all -- like eating and drinking to excess even more than Bilbo does himself. They sit around all night eating a meal after meal and drinking tankards and flagons of ale, smoking their pipes. A contemporary story this would be a sure sign of their laziness; such characters would be unable to be adventuring heroes. One thing I can't remember, and I'll have to see when I reread this week, is whether Bilbo loses weight as he gains his adventuring chops.

3. Lewis Barnevelt from The House with a Clock in Its Walls: The only fat human hero from the list. Lewis's fatness, on the one hand, is definitely associated with his dorkiness, his lack of athleticism, his fear of the dark, and all kinds of theoretically unboyish behavior. On the other hand, he is unequivocally a hero, and his heroism has absolutely nothing to do with gaining athleticism or losing weight. In fact, the idea that he needs to gain athleticism to become a hero is specifically undercut by the text. In later books in the series, he benefits from having an athletic (female) friend. Additionally, while his level of athleticism is questioned within the text, he never particularly worries about losing weight. I'll have to make sure my next reading this book thinks about issues of fatness, because right now, I'm definitely seeing this kinda kinda text as leaning on the subversive end of that spectrum.

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I have all of these half written posts I haven't made -- one about the Simmons College Summer Institute, one about Bloomsbury mercifully caving on their dreadful cover decision for Justine Larbalestier's Liar. But summer is coming to a close (already!), And I should just go ahead and post my syllabus for Children's Literature 414, Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Let me see. That's 41 fictional works, or 38 if you lump the Prydain books. As far as I know, and with some of these being judgement calls, 3 authors of color; 7 protagonists of color (8 if you count Laura Chant as multi-racial because of her Maori great-grandmother), 28 white or white-coded, and 2 neither; 20 female and 18 male authors; 16 male protagonists, 18 female, and 3 neither or multi; and 0 canonically queer authors or protagonists. Though there's one canonically-if-subtextually queer secondary couple. Also, three fat (if you count Wilbur) and two disabled (if not-neurotypical counts as disabled).

Obviously I'm better on some aspects of diversity than others. How much of the fail here is mine as opposed to the genre's? Probably a little of both. On the bright side, we spend a lot of the semester talking about these issues, both in ourselves as readers, and in the genre itself.

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(Update: I found the abstracts (PDF). They give a really good overview of the conference.)

I spent the weekend of 4 July (happy birthday, Berthe Erica Crow!) in Bristol, at the fabulous first ever Diana Wynne Jones conference, put together by Charlie Butler (steepholm) and Farah Mendlesohn (fjm).

I presented my paper, "Disrupted Expectations: Young/Old Protagonist in Diana Wynne Jones Novels," first, so I didn't yet realize how poor the visibility of the room was, and I didn't stand up to give my paper. Based on what I saw in later papers, I realize this was a mistake. Still, it seemed reasonably well received. Hopefully there will be conference proceedings soon, though if not, I will be putting the paper up myself.

I am writing up some of my notes from the papers for my own future reference, although what I really wish were available were the abstracts, which give you a good idea of the richness of ideas which were discussed. My notes here are very very preliminary and aren't representative of anything in particular -- only for which papers I scribbled things in the margins which I can now understand. ( Descriptions of some papers I'm not writing up )

( Tui Head: 'The Girl in Adventure Fiction' )

( Ika Willis: 'Mum's a silly fusspot: the queering of family in Diana Wynne Jones' )


( Martha Hixon: 'Power Plays: Paradigms of Power in Three Jones Novels' )


( Jameela Lares: 'Discovery As Virtuous Action in the Fantasy of Diana Wynne Jones' )

(  Deborah Gascoyne: 'Why Don't You Be a Tiger? The Performative, Transformative and Creative Power of the Word in the Universes of Diana Wynne Jones' )


( Jenny Pausacker: 'The Storyteller: Counsel in Diana Wynne Jones' )


( Kyra Jucovy: 'Little Sister Is Watching You: Archer's Goon and 1984' )


( Caroline Webb: 'False Pretenses and the Real Show: Identity and Performance in Conrad's Fate' )


( David Rudd: 'Building Castles in the Air: (De)construction in Howl's Moving Castle' )

Finally, I can't over emphasize how wonderful the conference was socially and intellectually. The level of the conversation (sitting around talking about books we've all read what other smart people) was fabulous, and meeting people whom I previously only known on the Internet, via the DWJ mailing list, LJ, or both, was just amazing. Not to mention the people I'd never known online before either, who I really did meet for the first time.

I don't want to get into naming names because then I will miss somebody and feel appallingly stupid, but steepholm and fjm of course, although for neither of them was my first time meeting them, because they have both been previously lovely hosts to the wandering American in Britain at various times. And Hallie and Katta and *brain explodes from effort of not naming everyone awesome that I met*... Also, thanks to Gili, I now have Archer's Goon in Hebrew.

On a separate note, two of my friends -- one of whom, you might have noticed, just ran an amazing conference on Diana Wynne Jones -- won Mythopoeic Awards! Congratulations, Charlie and Kristin!

I have 60 words in which to review a lengthy YA book which includes, in passing, hateful language which is totally in character for the protagonist (e.g. "fags," "spazzes in helmets"). The language is condemned neither by the text nor by any of the other characters; in fact, no attention is called to it at all within the text.

What I'm finding most problematic about this is not how to write the review. That's easy: I have 60 words, which means I tack on "bigoted" to one of my mentions of "the protagonist", which is about all I can do. No, what I'm finding most problematic is that this wouldn't have been an issue for me if the protagonist had been equally briefly and casually fatphobic, because I so take that for granted that I would have cringed and moved on. What's surprising in this book is that I don't actually expect over language of this sort to make it to the editing process without some kind of textual self-awareness being added. (I certainly am not surprised to find homophobia or ableism in contemporary YA, but more of the systemic kind, and not this sort.)

I know some people could make the same post and turn it into a judgment on the publishing industry for self-censorship, but I'm not one of them. I do think that language helps shape thought, and I think a raised eyebrow from another character or from the narrative voice could have clued in even the less aware reader that yes, the protagonist said "fags," and maybe that language is worth a second thought. I find it much more problematic that fatphobia is much more often treated with the same casual disregard this text gave to homophobia and ableism.



(Yes, I acknowledge that children's and young adult literature comprise a corpus created by adults for a group of readers who don't have control over their own literature and that we use their literature as a teaching tool. Like Nodelman, I find this both problematic and necessary.)

I've mostly been blogging on children's literature issues lately, not archives and library issues. I think this is because in archives, I'm much more concerned with the pragmatic macro/micro day-to-day realities of the nigtmare that is digital preservation, rather than with any attempt to drive the field forward. It's one of the reasons I haven't said anything about the DuraSpace announcement, not wanting to harsh on anyone's squee, because while in the long-term I can see real benefits to having a joint foundation, not tied to a single software solution, in the short run I just wish the Fedora Commons team would think more about the daily pragmatic realities of running a production preservation and access tool using their software.

But I am going to break my library silence because I haven't seen the Elsevier scandal get much play outside of the science and library blogospheres, and it should. In a nutshell, one of the ongoing Vioxx lawsuits revealed that Elsevier produced a fake peer reviewed journal as a marketing tool for Merck. The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was apparently high enough quality to fool doctors who weren't looking for shenanigans. Jacqueline at Laika's MedLibLog points out that this practice seems either more or less outrageous when you realize it's hardly unique. Good thing Elsevier assures us that it was an isolated practice and those responsible for sacking those responsible have been sacked!

Keep in mind that Elsevier has spent a substantial amount of time and money lobbying at least the United States and United Kingdom governments explaining that open access research will be devastating because it will be impossible for anyone to tell what is high-quality research and what is solid, peer-reviewed, and published by a reputable gatekeeper.

I've heard so much about Terry Pratchett's Nation that I was really looking forward to reading it, and I was very excited when I found it left by considerate housemates in the place where the night before I had deposited my borrowed copy of Oppel's Starclimber. I didn't know anything about the premise going in, and I certainly didn't know that by its conclusion it was going to become explicitly, didactically anti-racist and anti-colonialist. But less than 50 pages into it, I was already intensely disturbed at the world building. Alternate history Western Europe looks familiar enough, populated as it is with France and Britain, Christianity and the Magna Carta, Boadicea and the Crimean War. Yet the islander culture of this book is an invented people, in an invented ocean, with an invented island, invented animals, with an invented vaguely South Pacific culture, and an invented religion.

Maybe my immersion in the particular Internet cultures of which I am a part have changed me and my reading more than I thought, because I was surprised when Web searching did not turn up a whole lot of readers saying OH SIR TERRY NO.

The novel's author's note explains that the culture of the Nation is entirely unlike anything that happens in our world, because it is in a parallel universe. But if that's so, why is parallel universe Europe so readily identifiable? Why is it that Europeans look the same no matter what universe you are in, but naked, brown-skinned, equatorial islanders are people whose cultures you can invent out of whole cloth?

It troubles me to be critiquing this book along those lines, because it was so overtly anti-colonialist and anti-racist in its message (in its own complex KSKH way, at least). And I am not saying it shouldn't be read. I enjoyed it, although not as much as I have enjoyed some other Pratchett, and I think it's a fine book to put in children's hands. But I find the invention of a (sort of) Pacific Islander culture and religion really troubling in a world which -- very unusually for Pratchett -- actually resembles our world.

One frustrating thing about getting galleys (and trust me, I know the world's smallest violin is playing a maudlin tune right now) is that I want to talk about the books I read and I can't without spoiling other people for them. At least when I am reviewing I do you get to talk about the books, if not in a conversation, at least to what I assume is an appreciative audience.

I just finished my second reread of Kristin Cashore's Fire, and I'm overwhelmed by how much I want to talk about it (which, diceytillerman, means you are on tap). Those of you who have ever had to listen to me talk about books or culture know how much I love things that are kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic. Fire is one of the most kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic books I've ever read. I think I need to coin a new catch phrase for it: wicked subversive, wicked hegemonic. Except that "KSKH" rolls trippingly off the tongue, and "WSWH" most certainly doesn't.

On some axes -- say, gender -- it's got the same kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic reading which is pretty common in young adult girls' fantasy. But on others -- disability, attractiveness, class, family bonds, even narrative expectations -- it's just a wild swing along the subversive/hegemonic spectrum. Wicked S, Wicked H. Which, given my literary tastes, I obviously think is fabulous.

There are plenty of axes of convention this book doesn't challenge: heteronormativity, for example, or race in fantasy. Though it might be a surprise to the authors whose books I sometimes review, that's fine with me.

(Oddly enough, the last book I found this kinda/kinda was A Little Princess, of all things, which was much more complicated about class then it was in my memory. Though the book is one of my frequently-reread comfort books, the careful listen I had to give it while listening to the Librivox audio book showed me things about it I had never noticed while reading.)

Reason 1: Her blog post for today, "Intertextuality". Way to not-at-all sneakily introduce young readers to the completely accessible awesomeness of the subject they usually wouldn't get until college or graduate school, if at all, Kristin!

Reason 2: This galley which I am currently holding in my grubby little hand, with a cover graced with what I am reliably informed actually is an accurate depiction of a short bow.

I have such mixed feelings about Flora's Dare having won the Andre Norton award. On the other hand, I have mad love for the only other one of the nominees I'd had a chance to read so far, namely, Graceling. On the other hand, I think that Graceling seems to be getting a lot of (very well-deserved) buzz, while Flora's Dare Seems to be much less well-known, at least among children's literature folks. So here's hoping that Cashore and Wilce both get all of the buzz they deserve, and both get widely pushed on young adult fantasy readers as the splendid books they are.

And yes, I KNOW I have to read everything else on the list! I am so ashamed of myself. But first I have to review these five books sitting on my desk, and before I can do that I need to finish one of them, and then I need to *cough* write the paper I will be presenting in two months.

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What are some of your favorite digital libraries, archives, and collections? I don't mean what has your favorite content, but what is your favorite user interface? Which is easiest, simplest, most clear, most fun, prettiest, cleanest, most accessible, or simply best tied into your everyday workflow? What do you like about it? What do you wish were different?

(You might notice that this entry is crossposted from its new location, deborah.dreamwidth.org. I'm going to be cross posting from the new location to gnomicutterance for the foreseeable future, and everybody with a livejournal account can still comment over there using OpenID; your livejournal account is your OpenID account. Anonymous commenting is also turned on, as always. Gnomicutterance.livejournal.com is still going to be a functional address which mirrors all those posts, but I find Dreamwidth's commitment to accessibility and usability makes it more attractive than Livejournal.)

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Judith Krug, founder of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, and head of its Office for Intellectual Freedom for the last 42 years, died on Saturday at the age of 69. A lot of the ALA's commitment to intellectual freedom comes from Judith Krug, from conversations she started and from assumptions she made about the field. By extension, if you believe that amicus briefs have any power at all, a lot of American caselaw decided in favor of civil liberties are because of her. Even if you believe that sometimes Banned Books Week and the OIF weren't always as focused as they needed to be (I, personally, wish they drew a better distinction between "Banned" and "Challenged"), they've been hugely important in the US dialogue around intellectual freedom.

And via diceytillerman, I learned that Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick died yesterday. I don't even know what to say about that news; I'm pretty much stunned. I think I have to mirror what Dicey said about it: "I have a different brain because of you, and I'm grateful".