Fandom Research

Fansubbers: February 15 is your last day to participate in our survey! If you’d like to make your voice heard, give us a click and give the questions some thought. And thanks to all our great participants so far! We’re really happy to hear from you!

Kyle Stedmen is a fellow member of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts who introduced himself to me recently after hearing about my and Lisa’s research into fansubbers. I think Kyle might be one of the few people in the field approaching fan studies from a rhetoric angle, and to me that makes his research very interesting. Good luck, Kyle!

I’m Kyle Stedman, a PhD candidate in rhetoric and composition at the University of South Florida in Tampa. I’m inviting fans of various stripes to take a 5-question survey and, if they want, to follow-up with me in an interview about their creative practices.

To understand what I’m getting at in my survey, it will help to understand the kinds of things that folks in my discipline study. In the big picture, rhetoric scholars are interested in how language works in society, especially persuasive language; I’ve recently heard of scholars studying scientific rhetoric (the language people use to shape understandings of science), political rhetoric, and online religious rhetoric. And of course, “language” can easily be expanded to mean any kind of communication–there’s a “language” of videos, songs, video games, and anything else that people purposefully create. The “composition” half of “rhetoric and composition” can refer to the many folks who apply this study of language to writing classrooms, teaching students in turn how to successfully create messages for their intended
audiences.

With that big picture in mind, it makes sense that I, an acafan, would be interested in just what goes on when fans create fic or vids or music remixes. I’m a writing teacher, and I’m always trying to help students broaden their idea of what goes into researching and writing in different settings and genres and media. So I love the idea, for this study, of asking open-ended questions to creative people who compose in fan genres; my hope is that this will help me better understand some of the diverse ways that people find and use source material when composing, and that this knowledge might even help me expand my students’ ideas of the diversity of what “writing” really looks like.

But I’m not just asking fans open-ended questions about composing. I’m also one of a sub-section of scholars in rhetoric and composition who are interested in intellectual property–all those tricky questions that come up when we rely on other sources, like idea-ownership, citation, and plagiarism. In my field, scholars (including me) tend to be skeptical of oversimplified claims about intellectual property; we tend to see “ownership” of ideas as a slippery topic that, when too-harshly enforced, can stifle creativity, lead to political climates that ignore the importance of Fair Use, and treat students like criminals.

Because of that angle, I’m using this study to ask fans about their sense of ownership and creativity about the things they compose. I don’t really know what they’ll say, and I don’t plan to judge them one way or the other. I’m also especially interested the added angle of things like remix competitions, where fans specifically remix the work of other fans. What, I wonder, do composers need to keep in mind if they know their work might be remixed later on? What do remixers keep in mind when they remix the work of someone with whom they participate in a community? That’s why the project is called “Fan Culture and Remix Literacies.” I’d like to know what kinds of strategies remixers use that make their work effective (or moving, or beautiful, or whatever they’re going for). I think those strategies can be pulled together to loosely define a sort of “remix literacy” that describes the kinds of things that others should keep in mind when reading or composing effective remixes. Fun!

My approach is open-ended, and I don’t know what I’ll find. At the worst, I’ll have some intriguing conversations with a lot of people I admire, and that’s plenty.

On my project site, I’ve created 4 different surveys that are the same except for small word replacements (e.g. “fic” for “vid”). 3 surveys are designed for specific communities, where I’ve already collected data (Lost Video Island, Zelda Classic, and OCReMix). At this point, I’m most interested in getting responses for my fourth survey, designed for fic authors–especially any fic authors who have
remixed the work of others or had their work remixed. Links to all of the surveys are at my main survey page.

The IRB at my university has approved me to collect survey data anonymously, and to allow anyone I interview to choose how to be identified in any presentations or publications that come from this work. I like that–it gives the participants the power to disclose as much or as little about themselves as they like.

I’m happy to answer questions or talk through any of my ideas/strategies/methods/assumptions/craziness. Email is easiest; I’m at kstedman [at] mail [dot] usf [dot] edu.

Thanks for your help!

My main project site: http://sites.google.com/site/remixliteracies/home

My survey for fic authors: http://sites.google.com/site/remixliteracies/surveys/ficsurvey