Post rec: “Wearing the juice”

Posted by admin in Meta on September 3rd, 2009

This excellent post at Rough Theory tells us everything we should never do in fan studies:

Assuming this mess is not some sort of elaborate research-themed performance art, or the result of a revenge-fuelled identity theft, researchers Ogi Ogas and partner Sai Chaitanya Gaddam are trying their best to demonstrate to the world that they are something like the academic research equivalent to Wheeler. They have blundered into an online community whose members write and read, among other things, erotically-themed fan fiction, and have presented community members with a poorly-designed questionnaire (now taken down, but for a while being modified on the fly as people lined up with complaints about the research design - participants have posted screenshots and a text version of the survey after its initial modifications - note that a number of the final option responses and some other warnings and qualifications seem to have been added in response to criticisms of the survey in its original form - the modifications are often palpably different in style from the original text).

Among many other problems, the questionnaire asks respondents to provide sensitive information about sexual habits, desires and fantasies, in a setting where the questionnaire could be accessed by minors, without - as far as I can tell - having vetted the research design with their university’s IRB (the researchers are currently being hounded across several websites with demands to answer the question of whether they did, in fact, submit the project for ethics review - while answering other questions, they have steadfastly ignored this one: quick suggestion that, if the researchers don’t mean to imply the answer is ‘no’, then they should probably address this question very explicitly, very soon).

I highly recommend that you read the entirety of the post, if you haven’t already. And I can only hope that I never fail this hard. Wow. (Please, somebody, if you’re reading this: warn me before I fail this hard? Thank you.) Not least because I include a chapter on cognitive narratology as it pertains to fanfiction in my thesis. (Hint: Google Lisa Zunshine.)

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Sin to Win: A Big Loser?

Posted by admin in Meta on August 24th, 2009

Liana Kerzner is a television personality, blogger, cosplayer, and fan. She previously co-hosted Canadian institution Ed & Red’s Night Party, and is now a freelance writer and commentator. When I heard about Electronic Arts’ Sin To Win contest surrounding the release of Dante’s Inferno, and the controversy surrounding it, I knew I had to ask her opinion.

Well damn it, the one year I don’t go to Comic-Con, I miss out on being officially designated the hottest girl there!

I’m referring (jokingly) to Dante’s Inferno’s now notorious “Sin to Win” contest in San Diego. Yes, an apology has been issued by EA. Yes, they completely misjudged their audience. But the whole debacle opened up a can of worms that’s actually offended me more than the original contest did.

Check out this quote from Destructoid, who denounced the contest with the headline “EA to prostitute its booth babes for you, the customer”, and tell me this isn’t part of the problem, instead of part of the solution:

One the one hand, the job description for “model” opens women up to this sort of thing: models exist, inherently, to be objectified and sell products. Obviously, these girls don’t have any moral opposition to it, or they wouldn’t have taken their clothes off and signed EA’s contract (not necessarily in that order.)

Great, so if you’re a convention model, you’re automatically a slut who is nothing but a collection of sex organs. Excuse me? This defends us how? And who said these women were naked?

Other headlines include “Harrass a Booth Babe” (Mashable) “be a ‘willing’ victim of mass acts of sexual harassment” (Geek Girls Rule), and “EA puts sexual bounty on the heads of its own booth babes” (Ars Technica)
To all you well-meaning “champions” of us booth babes and cosplayers, kiss my half-naked, metal-bikini-clad ass.

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Guestpost: Kristina Busse on academics, fans, and the fuzzy line between

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on July 7th, 2009

This week, Kristina Busse discusses what it means to be an aca-fan, addressing the unique subjectivity sometimes required to walk in both worlds.

Online Salons: Fannish Meta Conversations as Ephemeral Traces

Defining Acafans
One of the inherent characteristics of both academics and fans is their tendency to collect and organize—things and, more importantly, information. And yet, as Matt Hills reminds us in his introduction to Fan Cultures (2002), we shouldn’t hastily equate fan and academic cultures or use similar behavior to conclude that they are generated by the same motivations and for the same reasons. Hills argues that representing fans as miniaturised academics is only “a compliment within a value system that particularly or most reliably pertains to intellectuals who have internalized these ideals” (10-11). In other words, being a good academic may be important to other academics but not necessarily to other fans.

One of the greatest challenges for acafans, then, is to represent and analyze fannish communities and their creative products while neither completely othering them nor molding them into familiar academic forms. Fannish interaction must not be subsumed into academic engagement even as it is shaped by and responds to academic discussions: many fans are academically trained in the particular disciplines acafans employ and even more fans read widely around these issues, including acafan works themselves. We thus face a dilemma: how can we respect and encourage the academic aspects of fan writing while still maintain fan meta as a distinct and separate discourse.[1]

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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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CFP: Transformative Works & Cultures’ special issue on race

Posted by admin in Publications on May 19th, 2009

Special issue: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom (Summer 2011)

Transformative Works and Cultures
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/

editor AT transformativeworks.org

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS

Sarah Gatson (Gatson AT tamu.edu), Sociology, Texas A&M University,

Robin Reid (Robin_Reid AT tamu-commerce.edu), Literature and
Languages, Texas A&M University-Commerce,

Please feel free to forward to other listservs, individuals, and to post
online!

DESCRIPTION

_Transformative Works and Cultures_ (TWC), an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011.

Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.

In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

*Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.

*Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.

*Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially
recuperative race readings (e.g., Randall’s _The Wind Done Gone,_ Rhys’s _Wide Sargasso Sea_).

*Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb Noire, and other panfannish and professional projects).

*Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork,
etc.).

SUBMISSIONS

Submit final papers directly to TWC by October 1, 2010. Please visit TWC’s Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines. Please contact the guest editors with questions or inquiries.

ARTICLE TYPES

Theory: Apply a conceptual focus or theoretical frame. Peer review.
5,000-8,000 words.

Praxis: Apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks. Peer review. 4,000-7,000 words.

Symposium: Provide insight into developments or debates surrounding fandom, transformative media, or cultures. Editorial review.
1,500-2,500 words.

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Welcome to FandomResearch!

Posted by admin in Meta, Site News on April 28th, 2009

Welcome to FandomResearch. If you are here, it is probably because you read things like Transformative Works & Cultures or Mechademia. As such, you’re probably interested in the relationship between media, literary, sporting, or other properties, and the people who consume them. You’re probably also interested in things like fan crafts and re-mix culture, and you’ve probably engaged in them yourself as either a creator or a lurker. You might seriously be wondering if post-modernism is dead, or whether fanfic is a force of nature.

If this is the case, then you are in the right place. If you stay here, you’ll get to hear about all kinds of new research in the field of fan studies. Here, academics and fans can post their surveys and questionnaires in the hope of finding new participants (as well as giving them another link back to their contact information). We can talk about methods which have worked in the field, and which ones haven’t. We can prevent redundant research by talking about the scope and intent of previous projects. We can find each other. We can communicate.

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