Tag Archives: CityLIS

FanLIS 2022: Brief Summary

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FanLIS 2022

The second FanLIS symposium #FanLIS2022 took place online, over the afternoons of the 19th and 20th May 2022. The event attracted over 50 attendees, interested in the overlapping areas of fandom, fan studies, and library and information science (LIS). We welcomed a global audience from the US, through the UK and Europe, India to Japan.

Library and information science is concerned with keeping the record of humankind, and making it accessible to all. It was clear from our event that creation, dissemination, indexing, management, preservation, access, use and understanding of documents within the domain of fandom/fan studies is an area of relevance throughout the world. Our call for papers secured international attention, and revealed a high standard of research, often undertaken beyond the disciplinary boundaries of LIS.

Papers around the understanding of documents and communication within a given subject area are core to the LIS discipline, and whilst traditional subjects such as medicine, healthcare, science, technology, law, business and art are well known and represented, works on domain analysis of fan studies are scarce. Fans are passionate about the creation, collection and organisation of documents of all kinds within their field, and work has often been undertaken and reported with little or no reference to the LIS discipline. This seems to changing, however, and several of our presenters detailed work stemming from their interest in fandom, from an LIS grounding and perspective.

Often dismissed as frivolity, fandom has much to offer the world; insight into thoughts, feelings, aspirations, hopes, fears and predictions. We ignore fandom, fanworks and fan studies at our peril. It is essential that LIS takes note of fan studies as a discipline, and that we acknowledge and reference the work already undertaken by those within the discipline.

Likewise, we believe that LIS has much to offer creators and researchers from the field of fan studies and fandom. We want to help collect and document this unique and multifaceted discipline. Indeed, many of us are ourselves fans.

Papers

As before, #FanLIS2021, we sought examples of fan studies research which crossed into the realm of LIS. We were not disappointed. Papers referenced well known writers within the fan studies domain such as Abigail De Kosnik and Henry Jenkins, and the formative Organization for Transformative Works. From LIS, we noted references to the information communication chain, creativity and authorship, and models from information behaviour and information literacy. Descriptive work, metadata, was also notable.

We held four panel sessions, and finished with an outstanding keynote from Casey Fiesler (@cfiesler on Twitter).

The first panel featured archiving; perhaps the most obvious area of overlap between fan studies and LIS. This panel showcased work on celebrity culture on Twitter, fansubbing on Youtube, network fan archives, (X-files!), and the generative nature of fan archives.

We moved to dissemination and publication in our second panel, with a look at fan binding, followed by an examination of authorship and sharing of crossover fiction. The sessions on binding of fan works upheld our love of the printed, tangible product in an increasingly virtual world. The session on crossover fiction drew out the fascinating desire to combine fan favourite worlds and characters to create new universes.

Panel three reminded us of the importance of metadata. This is fundamental to our work in LIS, as collections need to be discoverable and accessible. No challenge from the world of fan studies, we are working to the same goals. Notable that metadata used to describe fanworks is not standardised, and the move to entity relationship (linked data) is in the very early stages.

A paper from Mikael Gyhagen took a deep dive into metadata held within bookmarks on AO3, showing us how much untapped oil is out there in the fields of fanwork collections and archives.

The final panel examined reporting of fan related activities from the perspective of the fan journalist, and we concluded with a look at the many and varied information resources used by cosplayers. This final session demonstrating clearly the reach of fan studies into not just LIS, but also journalism.

We ended our event with a fabulous presentation from Casey Fiesler on the development of fandom platforms and policy, in relation to content creation, remixing, and copyright.

Environment

FanLIS 2022 restored our faith in academia. Excitement, good humour, and encouragement prevailed, as research and ideas from participants at all stages in their life/careers was shared and enjoyed. The future is fan related.

You can search for our hashtag #FanLIS2022 on Twitter to see what was said at the time!

We will share the recording of our event on the website, https://blogs.city.ac.uk/fanlis/fanlis-symposia/fanlis-2022/.

Papers presented at FanLIS 2022 are published in a special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy (thanks to our wonderful colleague Tim Gorichanaz for support for this!)

Will we do this again? Yes. Please save the dates 18th/19th May 2023! #FanLIS2023

Any comments or questions to ludovica.price@city.ac.uk  or lyn@city.ac.uk

 

CFP: FanLIS 2022: Fan futures – beyond the archive

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FanLIS 2022

Image © Ludi Price CC-BY-NC-SA

Call for Presentations

FanLIS 2022 is a one day CityLIS symposium to explore the intersection between fandom, fan studies, and library and information science. May 19/20th 2022, online event hosted at City, University of London).

Fan studies has long been interested in the archive as a site of preservation and resistance. Examples of this include the work of Versaphile (2011), Lothian (2012), Brett (2013) and Jansen (2020).

In this symposium we seek to broaden the horizon, and look at fan work production through the lens of the entire information communication chain, including creation, storage, management, dissemination, circulation, preservation, meaning-making and (re)use. Creation of fanworks goes beyond the textual, and includes a multitude of formats, from the analogue and physical – costumes, figurines, dolls – to the digital – game assets, fanfilms, memes. Fandom, and its culture of collecting, ensures that it is a site of continued physicality and materiality, yet the digital has revolutionised (and continues to revolutionise) how material objects move through their lifecycle. For example, how are collections of complex fanworks, such as custom figurines, stored? How do fans manage their gaming mods? What methods do cosplayers use to disseminate their works? In what ways do non-digital fanworks circulate throughout the fan community? How is technology changing the way that fanworks are published? What are the legal implications of fanfilms? We welcome presentations that seek to answer these and similar questions, as well as ones that consider what the future of the fan information communication chain might be.

Information Communication Chain

The information communication chain. @lynrobinson cc-by

In addition, we also seek to look beyond the archive solely as a site of the preservation of fan culture, and highlight the ways in which the archive – both online and offline – can be subverted by both their creators and users, be it through technology, usage. Fans themselves are instrumental in building and maintaining archives, and more than this – in developing best practice that can inform current practice within existing cultural memory institutions.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations relating to the lifecycle of fanworks, from both LIS (Library & Information Science) and fan studies perspectives. We also encourage work that presents perspectives from non-Western and transcultural standpoints.

Suggested topics may include:

  • Fanfiction on social media platforms
  • Fan-binding
  • Fan archives and their role beyond that of preservation
  • Fan journalism
  • Virtual reality as a medium for fanworks
  • The circulation of fanworks
  • Fanfiction and fanzine small presses and publishers
  • Fans as archivists and curators

We are hoping to receive proposals from people from all stages in their academic career, including students and early career researchers; and also from people of colour and other cultural/non-Western backgrounds.

Please send your 500 word proposals to both Ludi Price at Ludovica.Price@city.ac.uk and Lyn Robinson at lyn@city.ac.uk by midnight on December 31st 2021.

Authors of successful proposals will be notified by January 31st 2022. The symposium will take place online on 19/20 May 2022.

Proceedings of this event will be published as a special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy.

References

Brett, J. (2013). Preserving the Image of Fandom: The Sandy Hereld Digitized Media Fanzine Collection at Texas A&M University. In: Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, May 7 – 8, 2013, Austin, TX. https://tdl-ir.tdl.org/handle/2249.1/64291

Jansen, D. (2020). Thoughts on an ethical approach to archives in fan studies. Transformative Works and Cultures, 33. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1709

Lothian, A. (2012). Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(6), 541-556. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912459132

Versaphile (2011). Silence in the library: Archives and the preservation of fannish history. Transformative Works and Cultures, 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.v6i0.277

 

EDIT 1 Jan 2022: Due to the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, we are aware that some may have missed the 31 Dec 2021 deadline for our call. If you still have a great idea to share with us, please send your proposal before 15 January 2022.

EDIT 27 Jan 2022: This call is now closed. Accepted authors have now been notified.

CFP: Building Bridges: exploring interdisciplinary intersections between fandom, fan studies and library and information science.

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Image © Ludi Price CC-BY-NC-SA

Call for Presentations – all authors welcome!

***Rescheduled to 20th May 2021***

***Please note that this call has now closed, and the Programme and registration details will be available soon!***

One day CityLIS symposium to explore the intersection between fandom, fan studies and library and information science. April 9th 2020 at City, University of London.

Recently the fan studies community has become interested in building bridges between different cultures and disciplines, with Dr. Naomi Jones, during the Fan Studies Network Conference 2018, emphasising the importance of interdisciplinarity in moving the field forward. This challenge was taken up by Kelley, Price, Schuster and Wang in the Fan Studies Network Conference of 2019, where they presented their interdisciplinary, collaborative project on fandom, which started in the Spring of 2018. This collaboration brought together scholars from the fields of cultural studies, the digital humanities, and library and information science to talk about fandom and fan practice, and has allowed a wider exchange of ideas between disciplines.

In common with fan studies, library and information science has a keen interest in the utility of their research outside the field, and in understanding to what extent it produces an impact outside its own disciplinary boundaries. For example, while library and information science (LIS) has a rich history of user studies, its impact outside of the field is less clear, despite multidisciplinary studies being shown to have more impact (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015). Thus, it would seem that this is the perfect opportunity to bring members of these two disciplines – fan studies and LIS – together, in order to move the concept of ‘interdisciplinarity’ away from just a subject of conversation, towards something real and tangible.

Fan practice shows many parallels with the interests of information professionals, such as librarians, archivists and curators. Fans are ardent collectors (Geraghty, 2014); they take pride in the classification of their work; they develop best practice in the preservation of fanworks (Swalwell et al., 2017); and as some of the first adopters of the internet (Jenkins, 2006), they are comfortable using technological innovations which many information professionals have yet to embrace. Other fan activities with which LIS has overlapping engagement are the publishing of fanfiction as mainstream literature (Peckosie & Hill, 2015), classification of fanfiction, such as on the Archive of Our Own (Price, 2019), and copyright, to name but a few. Rarely, however, does LIS literature acknowledge the relevance of work carried out in the fan studies discipline, e.g. Versaphile’s (2011) look at the preservation of fannish history and Johnson’s (2014) look at fanfiction metadata. Likewise, there is little evidence that fan studies authors are aware of the rich troves of relevant work carried out within the LIS discipline. This creates a significant lacuna in knowledge, which could be assuaged by a less siloed approach to research conversations.

This symposium aims to be part of the nascent interdisciplinary dialogue, by bringing together scholars from fan studies, LIS and beyond, to find commonalities, inspire new conversations, and reveal hidden and unexpected intersections that will enrich the current discourse of fandom and fan practice.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute presentations relating to topics that draw links between, and are relevant to, issues both within fan studies, fandom and LIS, and to other liminal spaces associated with these disparate disciplines. We encourage work that presents perspectives from non-Western and transcultural standpoints.

Topics can include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Beta-reading and the fan as editor
  • Classifying fanworks, e.g. tagging, fan genres
  • Fandom and libraries/archives/museums/galleries
  • Fanzines, and fan self-publishing
  • Fandom and information literacy
  • Fandom, education and peer-learning
  • Fandom and cultural memory
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Fan news and fans as ‘citizen journalists’
  • Fandom and the digital humanities
  • Fans as author
  • Fans as collectors and curators
  • Participatory culture
  • Fandom and social media
  • Preservation of fanworks, including complex objects such as costume, figurines, dolls, gaming mods, etc.
  • Collaborative projects between fans and cultural institutions such as libraries, archives and museums

We are hoping to receive proposals from people from all stages in their academic career, including students and early career researchers; and also from people of colour and other cultural/non-Western backgrounds. We are open to longer style workshop and installation-type formats.

Please send your 500 word proposals to both Ludi Price at Ludovica.Price@city.ac.uk and Lyn Robinson at lyn@city.ac.uk by midnight on December 31st 2019.

Authors of successful proposals will be notified by January 31st 2020. Presenters will be expected to make their own way to City, University of London, but there will be no charge for presenting at, or attending the event, which we hope will be accessible to all those interested in fandom and LIS.

We are looking into open access publishing options for the proceedings of this event.

References

Ellegaard, O., and Wallin, J. A. (2015). The bibliometric analysis of scholarly production: How great is the impact? Scientometrics, 105(3), 1809-1831. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1645-z

Geraghty, L. (2014). Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Essays on Participatory Culture: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Johnson, S. F. (2014). Fan fiction metadata creation and utilization within fan fiction archives: three primary methods. Transformative Works and Cultures, 17. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0578

Peckosie, J., and Hill, H. L. (2015). Beyond traditional publishing models: an examination of the relationships between authors, readers, and publishers. Journal of Documentation, 71(3), 609-626. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-10-2013-0133

Price, L. (2019). Fandom, Folksonomies and Creativity: the case of the Archive of Our Own. In: Haynes, D. and Vernau, J. (eds.). The Human Position in an Artificial World: Creativity, Ethics and AI in Knowledge Organization, ISKO UK Sixth Biennial Conference London, 15-16th July 2019, 11-37. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783956505508-11

Swalwell, M., Ndalianis, A., and Stuckey, H. (eds.) (2017). Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives. New York: Routledge.

Versaphile (2011). Silence in the library: archives and the preservation of fannish history. Transformative Works and Cultures, 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277

This is a cross post originally published on the CityLIS blog.

 

EDIT 25 Oct 2019:

Authors are permitted to submit two proposals. To allow everyone a chance to present and to balance the programme, authors can expect that only one proposal will be accepted in the instance of a successful submission.

EDIT 31 Jan 2020: This call is now closed.

Our programme, and bookings for registration will be published shortly. Please check back for updates!