Me bounding onto Tumblr with a long welcome post like
Hi and welcome!
TL;DR: This blog exists because I've written a master's thesis about people's experiences of fandom and how they search for fanworks on AO3. Academically, it lives in the fields of library and information science and fan studies, and I've created this blog to talk about it and related, interesting topics, and to (hopefully, perhaps) explain some of the more impenetrable bits to non-academics who are curious about it.
Feel free to send me an ask! You don't have to have read the whole thesis first. (There are no entrance exams.) (Actually, please send me asks. I don't know where to begin. Help.)
Who?
Me? I'm just some guy who once fell head-first into fandom, unrelatedly* went to study library and information science at university, realised a year in that you can study fandom things, they allow you to do that, it's Proper Research and nobody will stop me, and found a new rabbit hole. My name is Rickard, and yes, that's my government name, because there's no point keeping it to myself when it's on the cover page of my dissertation anyway. I hope to become a librarian. I live in a small town in Sweden, where I keep slightly too many books, but my Marked for later on AO3 is bigger than my book case.
* Not, actually, unrelatedly. My first fandom was Good Omens. The rest... is quite possibly... not surprising.
Research about AO3 and fandom?
People have been doing academic research about fans and fandoms since the 1980s or 90s (or earlier, depending on what you mean by "academic" and "research"), and there's been research about AO3 basically since AO3 was created. In that sense, this study I've made isn't unique.** I'm not here to be the coolest and most unique boi, though, I'm just here to talk about this fun thing I've made. Besides, a good number of fandom friends participated in this study, and I think it's my damn job to at least try to make this thing I've written accessible to the people who helped make it happen.
** It's possible, although I haven't confirmed this, that I've done something unusual with my research methods, though – I used some methods from computer science, which seems to be uncommon in fan studies.
This sounds like a lot, though
Yeah; it's ~30k words of Academicese, I get you. Academic writing can be pretty impenetrable if you haven't played in that sandbox yourself. That's unfortunate, since I'd really like for the people who participated in my study (along with anyone else interested) to be able to read what their participation helped produce. My idea with starting this blog was that maybe I can use it to explain things in bite-sized portions and with normal-people words? I'm happy to answer asks about the study or other topics relevant to it, if you like. To the extent I'm able, of course.
You're welcome to come hang out if Academicese is your wheelhouse, too, of course. Maybe we can nerd out academically together. That sounds pretty great. I'll take any kind of ask as long as I have time and you're nice about it.
I spent the afternoon arranging our books by size and color (and it’s so satisfying and looks amazing) and my partner came home and stared in shock at the bookcase and then said “i’m a librarian, you can’t do this.”
it has occurred me during this process that apparently not everyone thinks about books by what color they are? like, literally when i’m looking for a book, i picture it in my mind. i have a very…tactile experience with the books i read and idk! i thought everyone did that lol.
my partner was like “how will i find [this book] for instance” and i replied “easy, it’s purple” and he looked at me like i was a witch.
This actually is interesting in terms of information-seeking behavior, which is a thing librarians think about a lot and often actually study (some library jobs require you to publish, and academic librarians, for instance, will often use the students at the college they work at to study how they search for information in order to figure out how to best provide them services).
When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call "aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.
OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.
In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s "about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.
Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.
sometimes I’m reminded that there are still people who don’t know ao3 was literally created by incest shippers — and the site’s sole purpose is to 1. be completely against censorship and 2. host all kinds of dark, taboo fics that are banned on other platforms — and the first ever fic that was posted on ao3 was a fic about an incest ship from supernatural.
you are in the house that was created by freaks. for freaks (affectionate). every disgusting thing you can think of is rightfully allowed and welcomed on ao3, because they are exactly the reasons why ao3 was created in the first place.
ao3 was created because its creators got tired of censorship, they got tired of dark and taboo fics getting banned on pro-censorship platforms, and they wanted a place that was safe for ALL FICS THAT WERE DARK AND TABOO.
ao3’s main principle is being against censorship and being proship / profic.
there are some things in fiction that make me uncomfortable, but instead of shaming people who are just minding their own business and not harming anyone in real life, I choose to curate my own internet experience by blocking/muting what I don’t want to see. ao3 has excellent tagging system, so instead of being a bitch, use their tagging system properly and you won’t see the things you don’t want to see.
it’s your job to curate what you see. it’s not other people’s jobs or responsibilities to censor themselves for your personal comfort. the world does not revolve around you.
also you cannot censor “only the things you personally hate” without expecting everything else, that isn’t of conservative beliefs, to be censored too. because censorship is a slippery slope and a fascist tool. I promise you there are people who think “why do tags for queer love even exist on ao3? they’re grooming children”.
if you allow the things that you hate to be censored — because someone with enough power gets to control what other people can and cannot create/consume, it will not stop at the things that you hate.
Also, this isn't really relevant to the main point here, but this is such a weird example when plenty of publicly available and often quite popular novels, tv shows, and songs have incest in them. I have a song on my phone called The Incest Song. Game of Thrones was massively popular. Chinatown was so impactful that that specific scene was parodied absolutely everywhere.
Also also: Hi, I'm one of the people who finds incest an uncomfortable thing to read about! I am very glad it's a tag on AO3, because that gives me an easy way to avoid stories I would be unhappy to engage with! Tags are great and they serve as both advertisements and warnings. The more you hate something, the happier you should be to know it's tagged on AO3.
Feel free to reblog for other people to vote. DO NOT SEND HATE TO ANYONE FOR WHAT THEY VOTED. This is merely for fun and to see what people genuinely think.
Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.
The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.
Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.
A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"
@witchofanguish it is also used in poetry and plays, ghosts talk like that. Imagine being in a folk story, staying overnight in an abandoned cabin and in the middle of the night there's a knock on the door and a bellowing voice going
LET ME IN.
and from the "me" alone you know that whoever is out there is not one among the living.
Hey y'all! So I know I haven't posted much lately BUT college has been crazy. And related to that, for one of my classes I'm doing a study on the relationship between time within the greater fandom community and understanding of fanfiction-related jargon. Below I have the link to the survey which will just have three multiple choice questions relating to your relationship to fandom and then a list of 15 terms to define if you know them.
Please reblog this or otherwise share the survey link with anyone you think might be interested so I can have as large of a sample size as possible for this. The form will be open until April 24th.
Thank you all so much!
(and yes, I will post the data when I get it all collected for all you fellow nerds)
A survey to determine the relationship between the understanding of fandom jargon and the time one has been in the fandom community
Anti (as in "antishipper") - one who is against proshippers/the "ship and let ship" mentality [for anyone who took the survey, I'm being very broad with this definition and as long as it has the gist I'll count it as correct, don't worry]
AU - Alternate Universe
Beta (as used in "No Beta We Die Like [character]"/"Yes Beta We Live Like [character]") - Beta reader
Citrus Scale (orange, lime, lemon, grapefruit) - Scale used for noting the explicitness of smut in a given work
DD:DNE - Dead Dove: Do Not Eat
Fanon - Fan canon
OC - Original character
OOC - Out of Character
OTP - One True Pairing
PWP - Porn Without Plot/Plot? What Plot?
RPF - Real Person Fiction
Slashfic - Gay fanfiction
WIP - Work In Progress
Y/N - Your Name
If you got ramble-y in the definitions, that's okay, as long as I can tell you know what it means.
BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE (info)!
Given the success of this, like I've said a few times I plan to do a larger version over the summer with more terms and being more polished. But in case it wasn't obvious by the survey being a college project (and me going a bit too young with the age ranges), I am a bit of a youngin' so to make suggestions more easy, below you will find another survey where you can-
Give up to 10 fanfiction jargon terms that you think should be added
Suggest the removal of any of the 15 above terms (with an explanation of why)
Provide any other critiques of the original survey you think should be addressed for a longer version
This one will be open for an indeterminate amount of time but since it's not for a college project I won't have time constraints so that's good lmao.
ALSO: From now on any info for this stuff will be kept on my new sideblog @fandom-data-enjoyer
Thank you again to anyone who participated in the survey, thanks in advance to anyone who participates in this, and I hope that y'all will enjoy the eventual longer version!
After lots of suggestions on my last survey to define fandom jargon, for a later, larger version of this I wanted to get some suggestions fr
They've put my thesis in the institutional repository
Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Guys. This is so exciting. I am a ball of hype.
Okay – so – ahem. There is this academic field called fan studies. I've just finished a master's degree and my final thesis was in that field. (Technically, my field is LIS, library and information science. Don't worry, it overlaps.) Today, my university uploaded my thesis to the institutional repository, so now everyone can read it! It's right there! Look! LOOK AT IT I'm so proud!
TL;DR:
This study looks into a group of Good Omens fans' opinions about AO3's search and tagging systems, and also talks about their thoughts about fandom overall. Specifically, I wanted to figure out whether things like amount of time using AO3, experience using other fanfiction sites, level of comfort with AO3's tagging system, or experience in LIS/librarianship or IT make any difference to a person's opinions about search and tagging on AO3. (There were no strong correlations in my data, but there were plenty of interesting qualitative observations to talk about.) I also looked at how, exactly, people go about searching AO3 in practice, what features they like to use, what things trip them up, and so on, using a fun method from the computer science field of human–computer interaction.
If you're a long-time user of AO3, the results of this study might not surprise you, but you might still be interested in the background and previous research chapters (a bit of background on the field of fan studies, a little AO3 history, what's so special about AO3's tagging system, and a tiny little bit of nitty-gritty about how its search and browse features work, for example). There's also a section in the discussion chapter about the social and community aspects of fandom (section 6.6), which I find pretty heart-warming.
By the way: All the data collection – the survey and interviews this study is based on – was done before the Good Omens finale came out. There is absolutely nothing in here about the finale. You are safe from that debate.
Abstract for the academics:
Several studies within the field of fan studies have examined fans’ attitudes to the curated folksonomy (tagging system) and search features of fanfiction archive Archive of Our Own (AO3). However, factors affecting these attitudes have not been studied extensively, and despite the conceptual proximity to the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), existing research employing HCI methods in fan studies is limited.
Using a mixed-methods approach, this exploratory study collects its data from a survey, two interviews, and three condensed contextual inquiry sessions. The survey uses a modified end-user satisfaction instrument to determine attitudes to AO3 search, comparing this to certain types of academic, professional, and fandom-related experience. Weak correlations are found between search satisfaction and familiarity with the tagging system, search satisfaction and experience using other fanwork platforms, and academic or professional experience in IT or LIS and confidence using the tagging system. Contextual and qualitative content analysis suggest fans both appreciate and are confused by AO3’s interface and that AO3 performs well on exploratory searches but falls short on specific lookups. Previous findings on fans’ attitudes to AO3’s tagging system and its effects on search are also corroborated.
This study adds to the literature about attitudes to searching and tagging on AO3 and demonstrates how HCI methods can benefit the fan studies field. Future research might use contextual inquiry or the search satisfaction scale developed here to study AO3 usage, or consider the meaning of these findings for questions in LIS more broadly.
Keywords: Information practices, fan studies, folksonomies, information retrieval, surveys, condensed contextual inquiry, end-user satisfaction, Archive of Our Own
(Can I tag @transformativeworks here? Is that okay? Hello OTW! This is (kind of) research about you! You can look at it if you like!)
