Presenters confirmed for FanLIS: Fan Futures – Beyond the Archive, online symposium hosted by CityLIS to be held on 19-20th May 2022. Speaker details are subject to change.
Keynote:
Casey Fiesler
Growing our own: The past and future of fandom, platforms, and policy
Decades before anyone had heard of “user-generated content,” and before most people beyond lawyers and professional artists had to think about copyright, fan creators were some of the earliest remixers. We were internet early adopters, we appropriated online platforms for our own needs, and eventually built our own. We created community and support structures and social norms beyond the affordances of platforms and law. So what’s next? This talk brings together my work on the role of law and policy in fandom communities and on the history of online fandom to imagine the ways that we can grow our own future.
Biography
Casey Fiesler is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder, where she directs the Internet Rules Lab and primarily researches social computing, ethics, law, and fan communities (occasionally all at the same time). She holds a JD from Vanderbilt Law School and a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech. She is also on the legal committee for the Organization for Transformative Works and, according to AO3 stats, in her fandom heyday wrote more than half a million words of fanfiction.
Twitter: @cfiesler
Susrita Das
Creating threads, making archives: a study of organizing and indexing practices around idols’ photos on Twitter
A compelling body of literature exists to shed light on how the emergence of participatory culture and Web 2.0 signaled a shift in traditional archiving practices to include digital fannish activities involving organization, preservation, and dissemination of fandom information and related digital cultural artifacts. In relation to such fannish practices, this study aims to look specifically at the archiving activities of the BTS ARMY on Twitter. Since a considerable part of the group’s success is attributed to the effective use of social media by the boy band, their agency HYBE, and their fandom ARMY, and while fan engagement and the employment of social media to achieve fandom goals such as streaming numbers and trending comebacks and releases have been important topics of critique and research, we are yet to understand more about the diverse archiving practices that fans engage in in order to participate in the fandom. The objective of this study is, therefore, to look at the many Twitter “threads” that are developed or created around themes that pertain to the idols’ appearance/ idol-idol interactions/ idol-fan interactions, and analyze how the archiving motive, that is made evident in the primary tweet and tags, and the response it generates, reflect fannish expressions of desire and the socialization of ARMYs around a certain subject of desire.
Adopting two key strategies—(1) conducting a microanalysis of interactions between fans within these threads and (2) content analysis of what they post—the aim of this paper is to assess how the creation and organization of these threads not only contribute to the preservation of memories of specific events and “eras” of the band itself but also amplify the possibility of discovery and induction (for “baby ARMYs”) and dissemination of information, much like traditional archives, while assigning greater agency as curators to the creators and followers of such threads.
Biography
Susrita Das is a final year M.Phil scholar at the Department of English at Jadavpur University in India, where she is specializing in the study of fandoms, writings about fans, and transmediality. Her current research interests lie in examining the intersections between storytelling in new media, fannish practices, meme studies, transculturalism, and feminisms.
Twitter: @soosposting
Jincai Jiang
Archiving as a foundation of fansubbing: a case study on fan-made translation of Virtual Youtuber’s videos and streaming in China
The development of web 2.0 allows Internet users not only enjoying their favourite content but also creating and posting online by themselves. These products are coined as user-generated content (UGC) and with platforms like YouTube and TikTok that encourage UGC production, fans (users with huge enthusiasm on certain objects) have increasingly participated in producing the fandom apart from solely consuming them. Fansubbing, which is a portmanteau of the word ‘fans’ and ‘subtitling’, refers to the translation practice on videos generated, and published by fans (usually amateurs). While it is well acknowledged that fansubbing is greatly facilitated by net-worked fans and state of the art technologies, few have recognised the significant role archiving gadgets plays in fansubbing. In addition, China’s fansubbing are relatively underexplored because of the euro-centric feature of audio-visual translation studies. Under these circumstances, a series of research questions, such as ‘how fan archives function as source materials for translation’ may contribute to fulfil the aforementioned knowledge gap. The principal purpose of the study is to investigate how archiving has developed into an essential part of fansubbing in China and in pursuit of this research goal, the researcher will collect data by a netnography (Kozinets, 2015). Via online observation and participating in a fansubbing group, the study will account for typical archiving use in fansubbing and discuss its significance beyond preservation, which in this case is subtitling. The anticipated findings include but not limited to Chinese Fansubber’s creative working patterns with cloud storage devices, and social media’s function in fan-work circulations.
Biography
Jincai Jiang is a PhD student in Translation studies at the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol. His PhD thesis explores the translation of user-generated content in China, specifically on Bilibili.com. He is interested in translator studies, translation in the digital context, and anthropological methods in translation studies.
Twitter: @jincai_Jiang
Nicole Neece
Archival maintenance as a means of preserving a fandom’s legacy
Fans of the cult classic TV series, The X-Files, are pioneers when it comes to utilizing online spaces for fan purposes. The 90s were filled with Usenet chat rooms and fan-created webpages where people could pay homage to their favorite show and do so within a community of peers. Those fans in the 90s and early 00s planted seeds of appreciation that have resulted in contemporary fans learning how to navigate outdated platforms in order to pay their respects to the roots of their fandom. For X-Philes, following trails of broken HTML links and finding hidden treasures buried in the Wayback Machine serves as a rite of passage.
In November of 2021, Liminalfic.org, a website functioning as a search engine for the 90s/00s The X-Files fan fiction archives, went down. A month earlier, xlibris, a website mimicking a digital library catalogue of fan fiction, was completely inaccessible. The threat of losing archives is a continual fear within the community. As the years pass, domain names are forfeited, meticulously designed webpages are lost to neglect, and some of the oldest original fans are beginning to pass away. The loss of these archives means the loss of a fandom’s legacy.
While the extensive work of past X-Philes has been lauded for their contributions to fandom culture, this presentation will examine how those fans’ archival habits have been inherited by the newer generation of fans — some of whom were not even alive during the show’s original run. Through investigating how the act of preservation and accessible dissemination are discussed by fans on new media platforms, I will examine how fans of The X-Files are adopting habits of the library science discipline for fandom purposes. While new works are published every day on contemporary platforms like Archive of Our Own, Tumblr, Twitter, etc, fans are continually choosing to become digital archaeologists, learning how to navigate online webpages older than they are in order to access pieces of the fandom considered now to be ‘classics’ or ‘staples.’ For X-Philes, trudging through archival sites has become a symbolic, initiatory rite, acknowledging the roots of fandom history to appreciate its influence on contemporary fandom. Sometimes fans take over the responsibility of replicating old fansites, others have gone through the extenuating process of re-uploading content to Archive of Our Own so they can guarantee there are copies of these works, and some have taken works they printed off the computer decades ago and scanned them to distribute as PDFs while others have started audio fan fic podcasts so these works can reach a broader audience. This not only serves as a means of fans ensuring that other fans are able to enjoy the same content they have, but it is allowing the legacy to become accessible to all within emergent digital spaces.
Biography
Nicole Neece is finishing up her Masters’s Degree in Communication Studies, with a concentration in Media Studies, at Colorado State University. Her master’s thesis investigates the functions of rape representation (non-con) in fan fiction, utilizing The X-Files as a case study. She is set to begin a Ph.D program in Texts and Technology at the University of Central Florida in the Fall of 2022.
Twitter: @NicoleNeece
Suzanne R. Black
‘Princes of the New World’: fanfiction archives as machines for generating fictional worlds
Archives are not just sites of preservation but are also sites of generation. The way an archive is structured (its rules and taxonomies) and the ways in which it is used necessarily have an effect on the items located within it, and so the centrality of massive digital archives to the sharing of fanfiction in the twenty-first century begs the question, if fanfiction archives are generative, then what do they generate?
This paper argues that Archive of Our Own (AO3) functions as a machine to generate fictional worlds, which can be read as alternatives to the fictional worlds defined in popular culture, in their political and representational dimensions. But the organisational technology of AO3 influences the fanfiction that it makes visible so that certain elements of fictional worlds are reproduced more often than others. I draw upon examples of fanfiction texts related to the television series Daredevil and Black Sails that grapple with the issues of which narratives (and which fictional worlds) are privileged.
Biography
Suzanne R Black (she/her) has recently completed a PhD in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in contemporary fiction, fanfiction, intertextuality, and queer and feminist theories. Her research is interdisciplinary and incorporates digital methods with literary studies. She has published work in Transformative Works and Cultures, FORUM, and The American Reader.
Twitter: @SuzanneRBlack
Naomi Jacobs & JSA Lowe
The design of printed fanfiction: Down to Agincourt and fanbinding as affective practice
In this paper, we examine the design process of fanbinding, through which physical, printed copies of fan fiction works are created. These are often bespoke, samizdat, singular objects that cannot usually be mass-produced, and include unique hand-bound objects for the designer’s own affective, aesthetic pleasure. Fanbinding suggests durability and preservation, and printed objects can be transformative works in themselves: designed, typeset, and perhaps featuring artwork, maps or other specifically created front/back matter and illustrations. Readers of these born-digital works may produce these in reaction to the fact that texts are published purely in digital, intangible forms, finding themselves craving the tangible, haptic properties of books. There are many design decisions involved in curating fanworks in a beautiful physical form, and we are interested in how fans go about making those choices.
For our case study, we chose the work-in-progress Down to Agincourt, currently four novels long on AO3, which takes as its critical starting point a single episode of the long-running television series Supernatural (2005-2020). Down to Agincourt occupies an unusual context by being highly literary in structure; its deliberate layers of complexity are designed to invite rereading and discussion. Its fans may be trying to possess an innately ephemeral thing: to encompass and annotate the text, to seek a more intimate relationship with it, or perhaps to memorialize the intimacy of the relationship they already have, a book being a beloved signifier of something less stable, more slippery. We report on a survey and interviews of Down to Agincourt fans investigating fanbinding conventions and preferences, in order to learn how fans discursively practice this highly affective art form.
Biography
Naomi is Lecturer in Design Policy and Futures Thinking at Lancaster University, researching technology and society, and the nature of digital public spaces. Naomi’s work focuses primarily on interaction; between individuals, communities, disciplines or sectors, and between people and technology and the media they consume. Much of her current research is related to how design research can be used in policymaking, particularly in the context of ensuring new technologies and digital platforms and services are ethical, transparent, trustworthy and respect privacy. This work often uses speculative methods such as design fiction to think about what possible futures might look like.
Twitter: @the_ladylark
JSA Lowe is a lecturer in English at the University of Houston, where she received her PhD in creative writing and literature. She has presented at conferences including Fan Studies Network of North America, Popular Culture Association, and Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and her articles have appeared in Journal of Fandom Studies and Transformative Works and Cultures.
Twitter/Instagram: @jsalowe
Shira Buchsbaum & Kimberly Kennedy
Fanbinding and community generated information circuit
Fanbinding is the practice of printing and binding fanfiction and other fanworks in codex form either by hand or using online print services. In June 2020, fanbinder ArmoredSuperHeavy created Renegade Bindery, a Discord server for fanbinders of any experience to gather, discuss, and exchange resources, advice, and files to support one another’s artistic object-making. The foundation of Renegade Bindery generated an increase in community-oriented practices in online spaces that support fanbound work creation: resources, channels, and challenges hosted in the server establish an opt-in communal learning approach that supports the creation of fanbound works. Moderators regularly add channels dedicated to databases, exchanges, and community events, nurturing the circulation of fanbound works and encouraging fan creators to produce works (in number and scope) beyond what they might achieve on their own through file-sharing, collaborative projects, and book-making challenges.In our presentation, we will expand on the creation, circulation, and dissemination of fanbound works as supported by the community-oriented resources shared in Renegade Bindery. Drawing from our book historical and information studies methodologies, we will examine how these practices locate fanbinding in an information circuit adjacent to traditionally-documented information circuits. Further, we will explore how fanbinding information practices relate to existing and traditional modes of fan print production, such as fanzines, and how those information circuits intersect and gesture to shared practices with other book-making communities.
Biography
Shira Belén Buchsbaum recently completed her Master of Library and Information Science at IU Bloomington. In 2020, she earned an MA in History of the Book at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she completed a dissertation on fanfiction production as complicating commonly-accepted book production models. In addition to her research on fanbinding, compensation, and community, she researches the economic, technical, and interpersonal relationships between rare book dealers and special collections librarians as they concern the circulation of materials in institutional holdings
Twitter: @sbooksbowm
Kimberly Kennedy currently serves as the Content Access and Discovery Librarian at Stony Brook University. She earned her master’s degree in library and information science from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2017. Her research interests include the information practices of fan communities, specifically the organization and archiving of fanworks in physical and online spaces. Recently, her research projects have focused on the practice of fanbinding and how fanbinder practices align with broader fanwork information trends in archiving and preservation, circulation and community, and compensation.
Twitter: @kennedykv8
Alex Xanthoudakis
Crossover fic and the crux of fan object circulation
Within fan spaces, the subject of crossover fic can be polarizing. Defined most frequently as fanfiction involving the characters of two or more fandoms, this particular fic subgenre is either beloved for its in-universe affordances, or reviled for its pedestrian tendencies (Fanlore 2021). Crossover fic operates in a liminal space; it’s constantly on the cusp of something. Through stretching textual canon or exposing readers to new characters and source texts, the crossover subgenre unbalances creators, consumers and the fic itself, and forces a re-examination and reorientation of the fan object—not unlike Ahmed’s queer phenomenology. In this reorientation, there is opportunity for further slippage: perhaps a reader of a crossover fic discovers a new fandom, or maybe someone shares that crossover fic and thus exposes other fans to potentially new characters. Crossover fic is thus an area of deliberate cross-connection; it represents an instance of network forking that has the potential to greatly enlarge a fandom’s reach. In analyzing fanfiction tagged as crossover fic on AO3—how many fics, from which fandom, how large a presence do those fandoms have on AO3, which fandoms tend to be used the most in crossover fic—I hope to gain insight into a key moment of fanfiction’s circulatory structure: the cross-connection.
My master’s thesis explored how fanfiction sub-genres—and by extension fan objects—travel across fan communities. My project culminated in the theorized “mycelium model.” So named for the vegetative part of a fungus, the mycelium model uses biological metaphor to describe the agile nature of fan object circulation across space and time (Xanthoudakis 2021). My model highlights cross-connections as the crux of fan object circulation—without them, the widespread sharing and re-sharing that is so vital to the existence of fandom and its gift economy would no longer exist. Thus, exploring what conditions create the most crossovers will shed similar light on the conditions required for circulatory cross-connections. To a lesser degree, this study would also provide an opportunity to test the mycelium model’s accuracy in describing the circulation of fan objects.
Biography
Alex Xanthoudakis holds a Master’s of Publishing from Simon Fraser University. Though her research explores the intersections of fanfiction and publishing, she is deeply interested in fanactivism, queer and feminist studies. Alex has presented at Fan Studies Network and Mid-Atlantic Association for American Pop Culture conferences, and been published in venues such as the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures and Journal of Fandom Studies. Fanbinding is her newest hyperfixation.
Twitter: @alexanthoudakis
Zoltan Kacsuk, Magnus Pfeffer & Martin Roth
Exploring the commonalities and differences in descriptive metadata databases compiled by online fan and enthusiast communities and public administration agencies using the Japanese Visual Media Graph
The Japanese Visual Media Graph (JVMG) project (https://mediagraph.link/), funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), has developed a queryable knowledge graph of descriptive metadata on a wide range of Japanese anime, manga and video games aimed at academic researchers working with these domains. The knowledge graph was created in cooperation with and from data compiled by various online fan and enthusiast communities.
In our presentation we provide a comparison of the databases that have been incorporated into the JVMG knowledge graph. By focusing on the ontologies and the coverage of the various databases we identify practices in data aggregation that can be seen as being particular to fan information behaviour. Finally, we demonstrate how the various types of databases can help complement each other in the service of providing a more complete knowledge graph of the domain.
Biography
Zoltan Kacsuk holds a doctoral degree in manga studies from Kyoto Seika University. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Japanese Visual Media Graph project, Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence, Stuttgart Media University.
Magnus Pfeffer is a professor for information management at Stuttgart Media University, Germany. His research interests include linked open data, metadata integration, information retrieval in heterogeneous datasets and machine learning.
Martin Roth is an associate professor at Ritsumeikan University and a research fellow at Stuttgart Media University. He works on videogames and digital culture, with a regional focus on Japan. For more information, please visit http://www.asobiba.de/martin/.
Mikael Gyhagen
“Comments in tags”: exploring bookmarking cultures on AO3
This presentation examines the bookmarking tags present on Archive of Our Own (Ao3). The presentation is founded on a probative study into the practices of bookmarking, through their public annotation. The goal of the probe was to examine the presence of (1)cultures of practice, and (2)usable research data available in the bookmarks on the platform as a whole.
In a separate pilot study conducted in early 2021 respondents reported, in interviews, several observations on bookmarking practices. For instance, where one user expressed the use of bookmarking as a reminder to revisit, the other respondent used bookmarks to store recommendations. There was also reporting of users seeking out recommendations by visiting the bookmark collections of other users and creators. This probe spins off from that study, where the divergent uses of bookmarks were highlighted as a point of interest. The original notion for the probe was to examiner the use of this function as a form of “Secret messaging” (Brett & Maslen (2021) Stage Whispering: Tumblr Hashtags Beyond Categorization) directly to the creator, outside of the public comments.
The fics examined for this probe were initially selected based on the number of words in the works, and the number of chapters, which was taken to indicate the period of publication for the work. The fics selected were limited to minimums of 25.000 words and seven chapters. The works were all published over at least four months. In addition to the scale of the work, the number of individual bookmarks was considered, and limited to works with 300 and above. The works were explicitly selected to reflect unrelated, and disparate fandoms, as far as possible. All data was collected early December 2021.
Findings presented are aggregated from the bookmarks with enough text content to allow examination. The number of data-points deemed relevant for the probe were around 11% of the total bookmarks, matching expectations going in to the study. This mass of relevant content showed a significant representation in the complete data, and pointed to general trends within the archive as a whole, rather than localized fandom behavior.
The probe revealed several layers of communication, in the forms of interactive tags, pure text commentary, and connections to larger collections. Each of the individual bookmarks, regardless of format, can be present on a spectrum. Based on the content, they are classed in groupings of “Archival”, “Referential” and “Communicational” for purposes of analysis. Applying these categories also pointed to practices in annotations of targeting specific, individual, audiences.
The probe revealed several different trends in individual users’ application of the bookmark function. These trends of practice go beyond individual fandoms, and point to cultures pervasive on Ao3 as a platform. The probe also shone a light on the temporal changes in bookmark, the fact that they change, and develop over time, and the difficulties this bring to the study of bookmark data. It also points at the possible connection to Tumblr culture of using tags as commentary, and supplementing to the way works are tagged, presenting an alternative reading of the bookmarking practices
Biography
Mikael Gyhagen is a Masters student at the LiS program at Oslo Metropolitan University. Originally working with Social Media, and Information Retrieval, he fell backwards into FanLiS in 2021. Currently, he now works on fan research methodologies while looking for something meaningful to apply them to.
Twitter: @Syntheticwhite
Qiuyan Guo
Fanwork communication through social media: a dynamic practice of celebrity fans
This presentation will emphasize how fans of Chinese musical actors Ayanga and Yunlong innovatively create, organize, and disseminate digital and non-digital fanworks on social media. Such fan practices, comprising the early stages of an information communication chain, go beyond our traditional understanding of (traditional) fan archiving. This research is a portion of my broader project on Chinese celebrity fans’ online information behaviors, based on observation of fan activity on Weibo (social media platform like Twitter) and semi-structured interviews with individual fans. In this presentation, I share two representative cases of fan practices to exemplify how these fans adopt social media as an information channel to communicate and share their creations and how this dynamic archiving allows them to negotiate community hierarchies.
Biography
Qiuyan Guo is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include media fan participation, celebrity fan studies, cultural studies, information literacy and readership, and information behavior. Her work appears in Transformative Works and Cultures and has been presented at multiple conferences in the US (e.g., Fan Studies Network North American, iConference, Flyover Comics Symposium, PCA/ACA National Conference).
Twitter: @QiuyanGuo
Colin Porlezza & Eleonora Benecchi
“I prefer to report on my subjects while I’m dressed like them…”: fan journalism and the centrality of relationships
Journalism has enjoyed a stable history, in particular in its institutionalized form in legacy news media, where journalism is seen “as a set of values, principles, and practices” (Deuze & Witschge 2018, p. 166). However, this apparent professional coherence is a misjudgment. In a digital, networked and economically uncertain media environment, the journalism profession underwent significant transformations, leading to a post-industrial journalism (Anderson et al. 2012). On the one hand, this entails work-related changes such as the deregulation of labor markets, the rise of new (and often contingent and precarious) forms of employment, and a technologization of the workplace (Örnebring 2009). On the other, the transformations generated alternative genres, formats, and types of journalism (Deuze & Witschge 2018, p. 173).
These new types are characterized by a more interactive (Peters & Witschge 2015), engaged (Ferrucci, Nelson & Davis 2020), and participatory (Lawrence, Radcliffe & Schmidt 2018) journalism, where journalists and users are increasingly collaborating, communicating, and co- creating (Jenkins 2006). We can thus observe a new hybrid professionalism in journalism (Di Salvo & Porlezza 2020), where professional boundaries become more porous as new actors, who ground their approach on different values and cultures, assume a critical role in re-shaping the development of the field (Hepp & Loosen 2021). Among these new actors we find fans of specific genres who collaborate side by side with journalists to develop specific themes, adding up to the story the journalist is covering (Porlezza, Benecchi & Colapinto 2018). In addition, we also find fan journalists a primary example of a hybrid type of journalism that bring themselves, their experiences, and intuitions into the coverage of fandom (Orsini 2011), nurturing a more affective and social dimension. Both for journalists collaborating with fans and for fan journalists, relationships both with the user as well as with the object of reporting become a central
element since “authenticity or credibility becomes more a matter of the relationship that an individual establishes with his or her readers than with the institutional role of the media organization” (Singer 2008, p. 67).
To comprehend how fan journalists reflect on their role and whether and to what extent they re-interpret or contend traditional journalistic role conceptions, we analyze the way they discursively constitute journalism’s role (Hanitzsch & Vos 2018). Understanding fan journalists’ identity is crucial, in particular because the relation between fans and traditional news media has historically been complex, with media representing only “certain and specific elements of fandom, often resulting in fans being depicted as pathological, hysterical, or as social losers and misfits” (Bennett 2018, p. 107).
This contribution thus investigates (RQ1) what kind of journalistic role conception(s) fan journalists demonstrate, and (RQ2) to what extent mimicking the objects of coverage is a central constituent of fan journalism. To answer the research questions, we carry out qualitative
in- depth interviews (Legard, Keegan & Ward 2003) with different fan journalists from Italy and the U.S. Preliminary findings show that fan journalists’ role conception corresponds most often to a connector: fan journalists try to connect the members of the audience to their communities by providing a sense of belonging, but also helping their audience in the complex issue of identity work.
Biography
Dr. Colin Porlezza is Assistant Professor of Digital Journalism at the Institute of Media and Journalism and Director of the European Journalism Observatory at the Università della Svizzera italiana. His research interests are the datafication of journalism, the impact of AI on journalism, and journalism innovation. Sometimes he also engages in interdisciplinary research at the intersection of humanities and social sciences.
Twitter: @herdingbehavior
Dr. Eleonora Benecchi is a lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Media and Journalism (USI, Università della Svizzera italiana). Her main research interests include Internet fandom, participatory culture with special regard to the spreading of pop-cSulture contents through social media and media consumption. She published scientific articles and book chapters in the field of Internet culture, fandom online and participatory culture in top-ranked journals such as Media Culture and Society and New Media and Society. Her latest book “Di chi è questa storia” explores the phenomenon of Internet fandom in a cultural and economic perspective.
Twitter: @Sakina77
Kimberly Hirsh
Where’d you get those Nightcrawler hands? The information literacy practices of cosplayers
In April 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word infodemic as one of the words of the year (Words of an Unprecedented Year, 2020). This refers to crisis-related information that spreads rapidly and intensifies public anxiety. Tech companies have offered “solutions” to fix this problem, but tech alone is not enough (Bond, 2020; Isaac, 2020). Individuals must exercise their own judgment when evaluating information,(Pew Research Center, 2017) something they regularly do in pursuit of their personal interests. Traditional models of information literacy overlook personal interests and social interactions as key areas of information literacy practice, focusing on individual academic and professional information literacy (Martin, 2012).
This study explores the information literacy practices of cosplayers, who engage in information-rich activities and interactions in the pursuit of their interest with the intention of providing insight that can be used to update models of information literacy. For this study, 10 cosplayers created information horizon maps depicting the cosplay-related information resources they use, as well as the relationships those resources have to each other and to the cosplayer. They also discussed, in semistructured interviews, times when finding cosplay-related information was difficult, easy, dissatisfying, and satisfying. They also described how they share information about cosplay. The researcher used qualitative data analysis and in vivo coding to create an aggregated information horizon map for the cosplayers and to find specific examples and descriptions of how cosplayers used resources depicted on the map.
Biography
Kimberly is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine Connected Learning Lab working on the TS4EDI project. She received her PhD in Information and Library Science from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she worked in the Equity in the Making Lab and co-created the Project READY racial equity professional development curriculum. She previously worked in K-12 outreach at UNC-CH and as a Latin teacher and middle school librarian. Her research focuses on the relationship between connected learning, fandom, and information literacy.
