Readings or tasks for reflections are listed here and are due on Canvas by 9am on the date listed. For each reflection, write at least 250 words (undergrads) or 500 words (grad students) according to the prompt provided. Please also include any questions or confusion you might have about the readings.
Reflection details will be added no later than one week before they are due. Due dates and a list of topics beyond what is listed here can be found on the class schedule.
Reflection 1: Interactive Audiences (September 4)
Jenkins, Henry. “Interactive Audiences? The Collective Intelligence of Media Fans.” In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. pp. 134-151. NYU Press. 2006.
Grad students only:
Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5(2). pp. 85-107. 1988.
In your reflection, discuss any reaction you have to the reading(s), including new things you may have learned and how you relate the concepts to your own experiences or concepts you might be familiar with from other coursework. What aspects of fandom here do you find most interesting, and why?
Reflection 2: Privacy and Ethics (September 11)
Busse, Kristina and Hellekson, Karen. “Identity, Ethics, and Fan Privacy.” In Fan Culture: Theory/Practice. pp. 38-55. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2012.
Grad students only:
Busse, Kristina. “The Ethics of Studying Online Fandom.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom. 2018. [Available as an ebook through the CU library]
In your reflection, discuss any reaction you have to the reading(s), including how you think the concepts discussed here might apply to the kinds of research you are familiar with. In this class, we will be working with scraped meta-data from a fanfiction archive, voluntary survey responses, and ethnographic observations. What will we need to keep in mind in order to ensure that we are conducting this research ethically, and respecting fan privacy?
Grad students, additionally discuss your reaction to the second reading that represents some evolution of the author’s thinking.
Reflection 3: Fandom Data and Analysis (September 18)
Yin, Kodlee, Cecilia Aragon, Sarah Evans, and Katie Davis. “Where No One Has Gone Before: A Meta-Dataset of the World’s Largest Fanfiction Repository.” In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), pp. 6106-6110. ACM, 2017.
The dataset that this paper describes is available here, though you aren’t required to dig into it for this reflection.
In your reflection, discuss any reaction you have to the reading, including what you think is interesting about this dataset. What do you think of the preliminary data analysis done as part of this paper? As part of your reflection, come up with at least one new research question that you could pose based on this data.
Grad students only:
Johnson, Shannon Fay. “Fan fiction metadata creation and utilization within fan fiction archives: Three primary models.” Transformative Works & Cultures 17 (2014).
Grad students, reflect on this additional reading as well, and also consider other types of fandom metadata that would be interesting to examine. What would you collect if you could, and what kinds of questions might you answer?
Reflection 4: Fandom and Design (September 25)
Fiesler, Casey, Shannon Morrison, and Amy Bruckman. “An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design.” In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). ACM, 2016.
In your reflection, please discuss your general thoughts about the reading and what you’ve learned about the design of AO3, as well as (1) What do you think is unique about AO3 compared to other platforms you are familiar with? (2) What did you learn from this paper that might influence the kinds of things you are interested in exploring in the research projects for this class? and (3) Are there any lessons from this design that you think could be applied to other online platforms?
Grad students only (you may want to read this first!):
Bardzell, Shaowen. “Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pp. 1301-1310. ACM, 2010.
Grad students, please use the same reflection prompt as above, but weave in a deeper understanding of feminist HCI. How do you think these principles do or could apply to other fandom spaces?
Reflection 5: Fanworks (October 2)
Coppa, Francesca. 2018. “Introduction: Five Things That Fanfiction Is, and One Thing It Isn’t.” The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age. pp. 1-17.
Coppa, Francesca. 2011. “An Editing Room of One’s Own: Vidding as Women’s Work.” Camera Obscura 26(2). pp. 123-130.
Read both of the articles above, and in your reflection, please discuss what you’ve learned about fanfiction and fanvids that you may not have known before, and any general thoughts you have based on these readings. Additionally, please reflect on these types of fanworks as they exist in online communities. In what ways do you think the online spaces we’ve discussed in class change the experience of fanworks?
Grad Students: In addition to your reflection on the readings as above, please choose a particular fanfiction or fanvid to reflect on in the context of these readings. How is it representative of the kinds of things that these types of fanworks represent and what their goals are?
Reflection 6: Queerness in Fandom (October 9)
First, read the Fanlore page on “Slash.”
Lothian, Alexis, Kristina Busse, and Robin Anne Reid. “Yearning Void and Infinite Potential”: Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space. English Language Notes 45, no. 2 (2007): 103.
In your reflection, discuss your general thoughts from the reading and lingering questions that you have. Additionally, make sure you specifically reflect on the role of technology and online communities in this context.
Grad students only: Chapter 6 of Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (“Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk”: Slash and the Fan-Writing Community). In your reflection, consider this as a text that is arguably outdated; how do you react to this now, and in what ways do you think it is accurate or inaccurate in the current context of fandom?
Reflection 7: Toxicity in Fandom (November 6)
Proctor, William, and Bridget Kies. “On Toxic Fan Practices and the New Culture Wars.” Participations 15, no. 1 (2018): 127-142.
In your reflection, discuss any reaction you have to the reading(s), including new things you may have learned and how you relate the concepts to your own experiences. In this class, we have primarily been talking about “transformative” fandom–that is, people who create fanworks. How would you relate what you know about transformative fandom to the types of fandom discussed here? Does this reading change any of your perceptions of fandom? How does this relate to other types of online toxicity and/or harassment you are familiar with?
Grad students only:
Guerrero Pico, María del Mar, María-José Establés, and Rafael Ventura. “Killing off Lexa:‘Dead Lesbian Syndrome’and intra-fandom management of toxic fan practices in an online queer community.” Participations. 2018; 15 (1): 311-33. (2018).
Please consider this reading in the context of the above as well, particularly with respect to potential differences in transformative and/or queer fandom.
Reflection 8: Fan Economies and Copyright (November 13)
Hellekson, Karen. “Making use of: The gift, commerce, and fans.” Cinema Journal 54, no. 3 (2015): 125-131.
Also read the Wikipedia page on “fair use” – JUST the section on “U.S. Fair Use Factors.”
Grad students only: Fiesler, Casey, and Amy S. Bruckman. “Remixers’ understandings of fair use online.” In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, pp. 1023-1032. ACM, 2014.
For your reflections: (1) In addition to any general reflections you have about the readings, reflect on fandom as a “gift economy.” Based on what you’ve learned so far about online fandom, does this make sense to you? How important do you think it is, and how does it compare and contrast to other types of online communities? (2) Based on what little you know about fair use after reading a wikipedia article, what is your initial thought of whether fanworks are fair use? Why or why not?
Reflection 9: Qualitative Analysis (November 27)
Taylor-Powell, Ellen and Marcus Renner. 2003. Analyzing Qualitative Data.
For your “reflection”, conduct a small qualitative analysis! Choose some fandom-related narrative data. This might be reddit posts/comments, comments on fanfiction, tumblr posts, etc. (For those of you doing ethnographies for your individual project due at the end of the semester, I highly recommend that you choose something related that you might be looking at anyway!) Collect and analyze at least 20 items (comments, posts, etc.) using the steps in this reading–you can stop with the categorization process. For your reflection, provide: (1) the categories/patterns you derived, with a short description of each; and (2) a reflection about this process, including what you found challenging. (You do not need to include any of your actual data in the reflection you turn in, though make sure you tell me what you analyzed.)
Online Fandom 