readings read themselves sometimes

Posted by aninfiniteweirdo

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Infinitely varied ideologies in inherent information

Internet archiving is unique in as much as it inherently creates its own set of metadata. When collecting a physical document, it contains a set of information, both physical and contextual that could help, for example dating it. Another aspect is that the collection and dating would happen after the fact and all at once (or, even if in instances, usually not one by one). When it comes to user-created content on the internet, the creation, collection and categorisation can be the same act (which, for simplicity’s sake, we could call posting). For example, the Organization for Transformative Works utilizes these unique affordances to unify its folksonomy while keeping the control over them with each individual creator. This approach is true to the Archive of Our Own and the Open Doors project.

Now, user-created content usually does create some kind of metadata instantaneously and allows some degree of control to stay with these users. (While this does, from an archivist’s point of view, creates some similarities between the Archive and some social media sites, it is important to note, that based on the user agreement and almost everything else, the Archive is not and never will be a social media site.) The important thing for an archivist to remember and this post is partly to remind myself as I read about the philosophy of the Archive in studies and plan to write about it regarding archiving: a site can have explicit and coded into its very structure ideologies for creating and collecting metadata and categorising, users are still also going to use their own ideologies for the same and this is just as true for the Archive as for sites without an explicit goal of archiving transformative works. This is something tag wranglers remember when observing tag usage before making decisions about synning or users remember when trying to guess which Archive Warning applies to their story (my own approach as a user is to use Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings), Open Doors volunteers remember when importing fanworks from collections with their own approach to tagging and that archivists and researchers such as yours truly* have to keep in mind all the time.

(Different g tools also have their own ideology when it comes to internet archiving which is something I will have to review soon. Care to join me for that ride?)

*Szabo Dorottya

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Posted by fanhackers-mods

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I was recently lucky enough to read an advanced copy of Henry Jenkins and Robert V. Kozinets’s forthcoming book, Frames of Fandom: Fandom as Co-Creation, which will be the fifth book in a 15 book series exploring all the many and various aspects of fandom. So it struck me that this would be a good time to catch Fanhackers’ readers up on the first four books of the series.

For that reason, I’m giving a larger than usual excerpt from book 1 of the series: Frames of Fandom: Defining Fandom. In that book, Jenkins and Kozinets articulate their larger vision for their project and its wide-ranging scope. Interestingly, in it, Henry Jenkins exp that his mentor, John Fiske, “had wanted Textual Poachers to provide a general introduction to fans and fandom in contemporary culture.” But Jenkins

“could not write such a book. There was not enough research yet.  Only now, following three-plus decades of expanding waves of scholarship, could I imagine doing so, and even here, we’ve ended up with fourteen such books rather than one.”  (55-56)

The first four books in the series, Defining Fandom, Fandom as Audience, Fandom as Consumer Collective, and Fandom as Subculture are already available at Amazon; in the coming weeks I’ll do excerpts from these in the leadup to Fandom as Co-Creation. –FC

~~~

Frames of Fandom is a book series intended to advance our most forward-thinking vision of what fans, scholars, and industry insiders need to know about fans and fandom. With numerous examples that cut across the gamut of fanships and fandoms, each book offers a different frame through which to examine the contemporary phenomenon of fandom. The books reflect some of our experiences and discoveries as Fandom Studies and consumer culture researchers. The juxtaposition of these two fields may sometimes be jarring since fandom studies start with a much greater skepticism and even resistance to business interests than consumer culture research does. The industry gets much wrong about fans, often acting in ways that damage, trivialize, and exploit their culture. We consider many of these critiques. But we also understand that fans operate in the West within consumer capitalism and will inevitably be drawn into close relationships with commercial franchises and brands. The question is what kinds of relationships they will have, and that is the central question that drives this series. 

Beyond combining fandom studies with brand research, other elements of our approach are also unique. First, these are books about fandoms, not fans. Their perspective shifts from thinking about isolated individual audience perceptions to embracing the collective dimension of fandoms, which is increasingly interrelated with technologies and devices. Second, this series of books explores the fan universe around the globe. There have been historic divides in fandom studies between media, sports, and music fandoms that mirror the divides many of us experienced in high school between nerds, jocks, and popular kids. As it has within academic fields, these divides have resulted in unfortunate silos. Sports fandoms were largely studied as part of sports science faculties and journals, while music studies handled music fandoms. Cultural and media studies focused, for the most part, on literary and media fandoms and only occasionally touched upon sports and music fandoms. Consumer researchers dabbled here and there, but mainly framed fandoms as related to brand gatherings. We are trying, the best our own expertise allows, to cut across those divisions here to show what these various kinds of fandoms, brandoms, brand communities, and subcultures of consumption have in common. Furthermore, we make major efforts to include, as best as we can, the full range of race, gender, ethnic, sexual orientation, and other social positions, and also to include representation from around the world and not just the more intensely studied mainstream and American and European fandom contexts. 

So, whether you are a student delving into the particulars of modern fan cultures, a brand manager seeking to unlock the potential of fan engagement, or a fan activist wondering how fandom might offer resources for social change movements, we have designed this series to offer you something that we hope will be valuable and unique

Defining Fandom: Book 1 Defining Fandom is the first book in the Frames of Fandom series. Here, we define and discuss the nature of fans, fanship, and fandom. Defining Fandom provides a fundamental conceptual grounding in the notion of fans, fanships, and fandoms; we introduce the auto-ethnographic style of the series, which draws heavily from the aca-fan tradition and the work both authors have written in that modality. Here, we define fans as people who passionately engage with their “fan object,” which is not a physical object but a media or consumer culture production like EXO, James Bond, or Boca Juniors (or, in Rob and Henry’s cases, Batman, Famous Monsters, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Led Zeppelin, Patti Smith, Dune, The Beatles, and many others). As fan activity becomes more social, involving people such as friends and family, it stretches into fanship. Fans become members of a fandom when they join a collective of others who share their passion and interest in the fandom object and partake in participatory culture. Being a fan and partaking in fanship are personal states or identities; being in fandom is connection and affiliation. Fandoms are composed of some of the most passionate, connected, creative, critical, and/or active fans. Fandoms gives participants an outlet through which they celebrate, support, critique, reimagine, and derive pleasure from the activities related to the object of their fandom. We use the definitions from Defining Fandom as the foundation on which we build and expand across the series.  (Defining Fandom, 173- 174)

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