[to have an orchard of apple-trees]

Posted by aninfiniteweirdo

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No Straight Story

I like serial storytelling; television, podcasts, longfics that we read one chapter a time for its ability to refer back to itself and weave several threads. These narratives would be overly pressured in the form of cinema, theater, the like. A thesis or a paper tend to build up an argument, in similar manner, from beginning to (happy) end, from introduction, through research question, methodology, literature review, results to discussion and conclusion.

It is a special enjoyment to present my thoughts here in serial form and I believe it has its use.

Fanhackers exists to highlight that fans and academics write the same discourse together, but in different ways. Therefore, highlighting all the places where the same thing is discussed is one thing we could or should do, making the methodology of these different ways visible is another.

If I was to write a paper about the information behaviour of fans, only a fragment of what I posted about could be shared. The way I weaved multiple threads of questioning instead of one hypothesis or research question or how I kept reading new literature which shaped earlier ideas, even initial definitions has no place in a paper but is more reminiscent of the very much nonlinear and divergent way the research process itself works.

Many aca-fans would admit to at least a passing fancy to library and information sciences, but this particular story started with a specific paper.

Price, L.; Robinson, L. (2017). ‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities. Journal of Information Science, 43(5), 649-664. doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2020-0089

I was fascinated with the question as much as with the methodology. I started searching to see if the authors continued this research further. They have written more about the distinct information behaviours of fans, but using different methodology. In the meanwhile, I started looking into what else has been written about the topic since these writings made references to the lack of research in this area. In addition to the information behaviours of fans, another topic that came up was the archiving of fandom – two practices that certainly inform one another but both are little researched (compared to information behaviour in general) and is also less formalised and more fluctuating in a way than what we usually think of as archiving. Thus, I started reading about both questions which brought more literature with slightly different definitions and different possibilities for researching them. These past few posts could provide a bibliography for the research question segment part of a paper (though, with the suggestion from any reasonable reviewer to narrow the scope down), but to actually write that segment would require some significant restructuring. With the initial interest in how fans seek and organise information, to a detour to why the ways and best practices of fannish ephemera is relevant, some literature on how the already existing archival systems could incorporate fanworks and finally, turning back to the question of how fandom already archives itself through fans’ distinct information behaviour and how this can inform information practices in general.

The real scholarship might just be the questions we made along the way.

Author: Szabó Dorottya

https://fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/822725277521166336

Posted by fanhackers-mods

https://fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/822133958643974144

Kirsty Sedgman describes herself as a Doctor of Audiences, and her wildly popular and highly readable books include On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better (Faber & Faber, 2023) and The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience (Palgrave, 2018) - as well as the collection Theatre Fandom (U Iowa 2025), coedited by Matt Hills and me. 

Her latest book, How To Understand Theatre Audiences, was just released in the UK and is forthcoming in the US.  Her contribution to Fanhackers is from a foundational scholar: Raymond Williams. –FC

~ ~ ~

The title and author of the work:

Williams, Raymond (1960) Culture & Society, New York: Anchor Books

‘I do not think of my relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues, acquaintances, as masses; we none of us can or do. The masses are always the others, whom we don’t know, and can’t know. Yet now, in our kind of society, we see these others regularly, in their myriad variations; stand, physically, beside them. They are here, and we are here with them. And that we are with them is of course the whole point. To other people, we also are masses. Masses are other people. There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.’ (319)

How I use this:

It’s easy to think about ourselves as complexly nuanced individuals who have power and agency over how we make use of mass and social media, and about other people as passively vulnerable, easily manipulated or influenced by the things they watch, read, and hear. This quote reminds me not to fall into the trap of seeing fans in this way, as an undifferentiated mass.

–Dr Kirsty Sedgman, University of Bristol

https://fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/822133958643974144