Archive for June, 2009

Fansubbers! Please click here!

Posted by admin in Questionnaires on June 23rd, 2009

Madeline Ashby (having defended her Master’s thesis on anime fandom and cyborg theory, and pursuing a second Master’s in strategic foresight and innovation in between writing stories about killer robots) and Lisa Drummond (a specialist in urban studies at York University in Toronto, and a huge K-dorama and manga fan) are at work on a survey about fansubbers. We’d like to hear your input on what makes fansubbing worthwhile to you, and how your team works. We’re not trying to pigeonhole you, or tell everyone you’re weird, or anything like that. We’re regular consumers of fansubs. (How else would we watch My Too Perfect Sons or the second season of Haruhi?) So we already love you guys. But, because we love you, we’d like to know more about you, and we’d like to share what we learn with the rest of the world — in the form of an academic essay that a teeny tiny sliver of the global population might someday read.

In the link below, you’ll find an informed consent form, as well as some questions like this:

How long have you personally been involved in fansubbing?

How did you get involved?

What motivated you to get involved?

If those questions sound interesting to you (and we hope they do!) please consider taking our survey by February 15!

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Guestpost: Katie Freund, “Supernatural” and Vidding

Posted by admin in Meta on June 16th, 2009

Please join me in welcoming Katie Freund to FandomResearch! When I was first putting the site together, I knew I would have to ask Katie for her input. She’s one of the first people I met in Toronto. I’ve watched her present on misconceptions about slash in Japan, and she’s helped me write pieces for Frames Per Second. This is another peek at Katie’s expertise, this time on fanvids, intertextuality, and how to read both as a researcher.

“It starts with a story, doesn’t it? And then you get the music to fit the pictures.”

“It’s more like visual fanfic, I think—“

“Yeah, exactly – it’s the story I see in my head when I hear the music… It’s taking it out of your head and putting it out there so other people can see it too.”

“It’s closer to making something like art, isn’t it? It’s drawing a picture for people, a visual text for them to follow.”

There are six of us crowded around a table stuffed with junk food and my single voice recorder in a hotel room in England. I am listening to a group of editors I am interviewing debate the origins of vidding, or fan-made remix videos at VidUKon, a fan convention. It’s a story, I am told, a visual version of fan fiction. It’s an individual’s imagination, their art: vids can be complex treatments of race or gender in popular television, in-depth examinations of certain characterscertain characters, or tributes to beloved shows now cancelled. But above all else, it’s fun.

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Questionnaire: vidding demographics and copyright

Posted by admin in Questionnaires on June 10th, 2009

Upcoming guestblogger, Katie Freund sent me her latest survey, and asked me if I would be interested in posting it. Naturally, I was! Here’s how she explains it:

Here is the questionnaire I distributed among 8 different online vidding communities on Livejournal.com for the purposes of my postgraduate research (at the time, an MA thesis although I have since upgraded to the PhD programme). I sought to gather a variety of qualitative and quantitative data, as I desired both statistics on demographic composition of the community, internet and computer use, and fandoms participated in, as well as more thoughtful and open-ended long answer questions on copyright/fair use issues, the vidding community, and the art and practice of vidding itself. A full consent form was not deemed necessary for this online questionnaire, but those who took it were directed to a participant information sheet detailing the ethical concerns of completing this survey.

The survey was at first not well-received by the community as it the vidders several hours to complete, rather than the half hour or so I had indicated in the introduction. Also, many vidders commented that my questions were extremely difficult to answer and that things were not nearly so cut-and-dried as I may have thought (or hoped!). I then altered the introduction in response to their concerns and it was much better received as far as I can tell. To date, I have received 150 responses, but only 63 have completed all the sections (42%).

For more information about my research, please check out my research blog at http://fanthropology.blogspot.com or email me at fanthropology (at) gmail (dot) com.

If you’re interested, you can refer to (or take!) the survey here.

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A summer’s worth of guestposts

Posted by admin in Site News on June 3rd, 2009

One of the things which always strikes me about the Internet is the generosity of its inhabitants. Perhaps it’s because I’m asking the notoriously gift-oriented fannish crowd for their input, or maybe I just happen to have made a lucky series of acquaintances over the years, but when I started asking people for guestposts, they replied eagerly. The roster is by no means solid, but here’s a sneak peek at what we’ll be discussing this summer:

  • cosplay, photography, and convention behaviour for the fanthropologist
  • vidding (how to read it, how to cite it, why it’s awesome)
  • the cultural assumptions Westerners bring to anime
  • a look at a fan-studies thesis proposal and bibliography (good for students just starting out)

And those are just the people who have emailed me back! I’ve already put the feelers out for some more posts, and will update you as things happen. Meantime, comment here if you can think of other researchers whose work you’d like to hear more about.

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Guestpost: Karen Hellekson on research ethics

Posted by admin in Meta on June 1st, 2009

Since fan studies questionnaires and surveys aren’t released every day, I thought it might be interesting to hear from professionals in the field about their experiences. With any luck, we’ll see more of these posts in the future. For the moment, I’m pleased to introduce a woman who needs no introduction: Karen Hellekson, co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. -Madeline

Fandom research methods

Karen Hellekson

ClinicalTrials.gov provides a model for Fandom Research in terms of attempting to corral study information in one handy place. Fandom Research collects various methods of polling or querying various fan communities, whereas ClinicalTrials.gov collects information about clinical trials that may be accessed by researchers and by regular people who may want to get in on that new cancer drug trial. Compared with creating a good set of valid measures in the ethnography-based fan world, setting up a clinical trial is easy, if only because its protocols are universally well understood, thanks to tried-and-true codes of best practice. Institutional review board approval? Check! Informed consent? Check! Double-blind randomization? Check! Validated questionnaire? Check! Statistical analysis with the correct test for the type of data? Check!

Of course it’s inappropriate to generalize the protocols used in medical clinical trials to fandom research, but many acafans setting up studies need to be aware of the requirements that will ensure the validity—and publishability—of their work. Before initiating a study that involves human subjects, acafans affiliated with a university may need to wend their way through their institution’s byzantine institutional review board (IRB) paperwork, where they will be faced with ridiculous requirements that have nothing to do with their discipline. IRBs generally work with proposed studies that are biomedical or behavioral, not in the field of social science, and the one-size-fits-all paperwork reflects that.

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