Carol Zhang, a second year Masters of Digital Arts and Humanities student at the University of British Columbia Okanagan is doing research on Archive of Our Own under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Cinnamon. This research is specifically examining how users interact with the archive’s tagging system and how their wider Internet usage could impact that. Part of this research is the survey - available on this link - for which Zhang is looking for participants.
The survey is anonymous and it takes 10-15 minutes to fill out. It will be available on the above link until January 20th. Participants must be at least 18 years old. More information about how the responses will be stored can be found in the consent form and if you have any further questions, you can contact Carol Zhang at the email address [email protected].
The results of the research will be available through the university’s thesis archive, cIRcle.
If you are interested in talking about content management tools and your experience navigating the archive and you are eligible, consider contributing to the research by filling out the survey.
In July's OTW newsletter, Fanhackers is looking for zine submissions, the 2024 Election is around the corner, and Policy & Abuse made a pie chart of 2024 ticket submissions so far! Read all that and more at: https://otw-news.org/4fs2uyk7
Fandom is all about community and the friends we’ve made along the way! To celebrate the upcoming Fanhackers Fandom Friendships zine, we’ll be running a brand-new editing challenge on the Fanlore wiki from November 11th through 24th. Complete tasks by adding content to community-themed articles and earn badges for your edits!
You can learn more on how to participate in our Fandom Friendships Challenge guide!
Don’t forget to also check out the zine’s submission page! If your fandom friendships have shaped your experience as a fan, consider submitting to the zine, which is open until November 30th.
If this is your first time editing Fanlore, you can also check out our New Visitor Portal and tutorial pages to learn how to get started, or join our Discord server to chat with other Fanlore editors!
We hope to meet you on the pages of Fanlore, and happy editing!
First of all, I hope everyone is doing fine and taking care of yourselves. Things have been hard for me, this is why I'm not posting here or dropping by at all. Honestly, I'm living just by doing the bare minimum each day and my bare minimum right now is my undergrad dissertation and that's why I'm here! I need some help!
My research is about fanfiction and its characteristics. I'll analyze a few Tumblr posts written between 2014 and 2021 that reflects, criticizes or points out fanfiction aspects in a wide range in a way to to explore some thoughts of fic writers and readers about fanfiction and its characterizations. The goal is to compare to academic studies related to fanfiction and then contrast everything that was gathered with my own experience. During my research I'll take part of XiChengClipse, a fan event that you can create fanworks to a non-canon pairing from The Untamed series. My plan is to write a fic and document the whole process and compare my findings with the information I gathered not only from fans, but also academic researchers. That's the initial idea, not sure how the project will end up like, but anyways!!!!
My issue right now is that I only have got a couple of texts about fanfiction and I'd like suggestions to expand my very limited options and see if I can find more compelling texts.
Requirements:
It needs to be some kind of analysis, criticism or reflection about fanfiction - it can focus in any kind of aspect: format, linguistic, pacing, genre, comparison to original fiction, tropes, etc. It just have to be about fanfiction and its characteristics.
The post MUST have been posted originally on Tumblr between 2014 and 2021.
The post doesn't need to include just the original post, you can send a post with a discussion and/or relevant commentary added after the post got out in the Tumblr world.
You just need to drop the link in the replies of this post and nothing more. If you guys can reblog to put the word out, it'd be even better!
Thanks everyone who can help me and sorry for the long text!
Episode #015: Fanfiction Class with Dr. Anne Jamison
Roll call! This week, Maggie and V interview Dr. Anne Jamison @annejamison, who teaches classes on fanfiction at the University of Utah and Princeton University. They discuss fandom friendships, grammar, diversity in fandom, the lost thread of Star Wars, why people love #johnlock, and the golden age of Twific.
This Episode Covers…
fandom • fanfiction • acafandom • twilight • 50 shades of grey • the submissive • wide awake • basset hounds • fic: why fanfiction is taking over the world • beautiful bastard • diversity in fandom • diversity in fanfiction • ao3 • wattpad • twific • grammar • windows/mirrors theory • sherlock holmes • buffy: the vampire slayer • veronica mars • richonne • education • sex education • dead fandoms • the x-files • gladiator • the eagle • channing tatum • re-solved mysteries podcast • unsolved mysteries
LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE wherever you get your podcasts!
Make sure to follow I Met You On LJ on your favorite social media:
On literary standards, ‘good writing’ and fanfiction
(@zmediaoutlet I’m looking at you - I meant to message this to you but it’s WAY too long. But it’s in response to these two posts of yours: 1 / 2.)
This thing about good writing/bad writing and how you determine which is which is interesting to me because a lot of the academic work I've done - including my PhD - has looked at texts that others have considered 'bad writing'. (I was working on cheap fiction from the early c19, which is very melodramatic, founded in repetitive genre cliche, uses a sort of heightened self-consciously ~literary language, contains a lot of political polemic, and lots of other things that don't fit into the model of the Victorian realist novel.) Working on those kinds of texts the point of view that I've come to find most useful is less about 'goodness' (measured against standards of 'the literary') and more about 'success'. Does a piece manage to achieve what it wants to do, within the parameters of its form/intention?
Of course that relies on the reader having a sense of the genre/context which would give them an idea of what it is that the author is looking to achieve - of what are the success criteria for a work of this type - but a) that's useful in itself because it requires paying close attention to generic convention and b) I think I like it as a reading approach because it's more flexible and because it doesn't privilege a particular set of standards which are bound up, as you say, with an educational background that has historically been accessible only to certain privileged classes of society. If you're responding to the rules that the text is helping to make for itself then it means you're open to thinking about different ways that texts can work on their readers and I think that can be really rewarding. (The readers for the stuff I was doing in my PhD were mostly drawn from the working classes. They didn't have the same educational background as the wealthy people who had historically been the readership for printed fiction and as such it would be weird if the people writing for this audience produced works of the same type as were being sold to the rich. That doesn't mean, I think, that what was being done in that cheap fiction was less valuable or less interesting or less 'good'. It's just a different set of techniques with their own ends and investigating them offers a new perspective on some of the things that literature can do.)
Also - and I've been meaning to respond to this for ages but let's do it here - I was interested in how firmly you drew the dividing line in this response (which was fascinating so thank you) between emotive/catharsis fic vs 'literary' fic which you frame as more logical and argumentative (about exploring a point of view rather than working through an emotion). Surely the lines are a lot more blurred? When I read and enjoy a work of literature it's not primarily an analytical experience, most of the time; it's much more about the emotional response that the text evokes in me. That doesn't mean that I can't admire something that's deftly written or clever or thought-provoking, just that the emotional level is always present and often at the forefront. This isn’t necessarily different in fic. I think a lot of ‘literary’ fic is absolutely working with an emotional goal in mind.
I was thinking about this because in general the role of emotion in literature is another thing that really interests me, particularly in the context I guess of an academic response - why it's more sort of academically respectable to talk about literature in a dispassionate way than it is to discuss its affective impact on us. Literature - it seems to me - is so much about emotion, and exploring emotion, and getting an empathetic sense of other people's experiences which is inevitably largely emotional in nature just because that's how we interact with the world, that the idea of having to neatly separate off our emotional responses to it in order to provide a 'serious' reading is... well, I think it's another reflection of the idea that there's a proper audience for literature and a proper way to read it and anything outside that is less or wrong. That's not me personally getting at you, btw, no way, I'm just... thinking about it.
To clarify that last point; what you see a lot of in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century is educated male elites getting twitchy about the new audiences coming to printed texts (specifically women and the working class), and the way they sort of tried to exclude these audiences from the debate was to characterise them as very emotional readers who couldn't control their responses to literature. This made them vulnerable to bad influences and demanded that the existing elites take a sort of supervisory role, choosing which texts were suitable for these audiences to consume in order to ensure that they didn't come to harm from reading texts that were too ~exciting (politically, sexually). So of course one response to that is for these audiences to sort of haul themselves up and demonstrate that they can participate in cultural debate in the same detached dispassionate way as the male elite supposedly does already. But the other way is to query that whole premise by pointing out that actually, that's nonsense. Nobody's response to literature or art is devoid of emotion and if it IS devoid of emotion then it's a very narrow, limited kind of response to have. In the C19 a lot of these debates are framed around pornography and people's access to it - it's okay for rich men to look at things which wouldn't be suitable for women or the working class. (Think about the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial - this was a book that got banned in the UK in the 1920s - famously the barrister for the prosecution asked the jury if this was a novel they would be happy for their 'wives or servants' to read.) The justification for that is that these men can be detached, scientific, whatever in their responses. But that's obviously disingenuous when the whole point of porn is the emotional/physical response it provokes.
So I suppose from the course of doing the PhD, what I’ve come to is sort of... a skepticism about the way that an education in literary criticism can often encourage us to respond to what we read. I think it misses out some key elements of what literature does and I think there are sort of palpable reasons for the approach it takes which are founded in outdated models of literary interaction that try and dictate who readers ought to be and how texts ought to go about their business. And I find it more fun, if sometimes more work, to try and do something closer to what I’ve seen called ‘reparative reading’, where you try and build a set of standards that are particular to a certain type or genre of text. And in the context of fanfiction in particular, I think this is relevant because this is a genre written largely by and for a marginalised audience and so there’s an absolutely direct comparison to the kinds of material I was looking at from the nineteenth century.
I know that what you’ve been saying doesn’t sit in direct contradiction to this. It seems more like, you know what kinds of texts you most enjoy and the criteria for those align quite closely with established academic standards about ‘the literary’, which doesn’t of course mean that you wouldn’t leave room for the kind of approach I’m describing. But I wanted to write a fuller response to the ideas you’ve been throwing around, and so, here it is!
"While print fan fiction does exist by way of fanzines, print-on-demand services, and fanbinding (the practice of printing out and binding fan fiction DIY-style), the vast majority of fan fiction is only found in digital formats. However, some participants indicated some level of separation between reading fan fiction and fiction and spoke about them as though they were entirely different hobbies. This distinction in the participants’ preferences for the format of their reading materials could be acting as a separation: print for fiction and digital for fan fiction may help them to keep their two reading hobbies distinct."
Miller, J. Nicole. “Information-Seeking Behaviors of Young Adult Readers of Fiction and Fan Fiction.” In “Fandom Histories,” edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby S. Waysdorf, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2245
Yet Tumblr was also a deeply flawed “blue hellscape” to many of its users, a technologically frustrating, often unsafe platform that did not always serve all its users well. As our authors testify, its most vulnerable groups faced the same challenges on Tumblr as they did in real life. Nonetheless, these sub- cultures persisted on the platform because it offered participants the best option and tools for alternative networking among very limited choices. Tumblr was, for many, a deinstitutionalized, underfunded, unauthorized, constantly on- the- run think tank– cum– chocolate factory, a subcultural, countercultural place where alternative pleasures, education and resource-sharing, creative and critical work happened. During its first decade, Tumblr became the space for the development of, for example, Black feminist theory, LGBTQ+/nonbinary identity formation, disability and chronic pain collectivities, critical media culture, and alternative body erotics and porn. The increasing calls for social justice that marked the 2010s, especially among young people, prompted The New York Times in 2014 to acknowledge the platform’s youth subcultures as heralding “the age of Tumblr activism.”
Given Tumblr’s uniqueness as a platform and the ephemerality of the internet, we began this book in early 2016 with the goal of representing and preserving evidence of Tumblr’s creative forms and critical voices, and we structured this book accordingly. The experience of Tumblr is the experience of multiplicity. Our intention has always been to make this volume as poly-vocal as possible, which means we have included a wide variety of voices, some of which clash with each other, in an attempt to mirror the experience of encountering the variety of perspectives on Tumblr.
–“You Must Be New Here: An Introduction” (2020), by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoc,
from a tumblr book: platform and cultures
