Fanwork Communication through Social Media: A Dynamic Practice of Celebrity Fans in China

Contemporary Chinese celebrity fans mainly engage in two innovative types of fanwork communications through social media: 1) digital relays of sequentially creating and presenting their own complete fan art and fiction and 2) dissemination of fan-made non-digital peripheral materials by mail or in person after online showcasing. Based on unobtrusive observation and semi-structured interviews, this paper presents the specific steps in both types of communication activities among fans of two Chinese musical actors, Ayanga and Yunlong, on the Weibo platform. Exceeding fans’ traditional sole emphasis on cataloging their creations, these fanwork communications comprise the information creation (organization), dissemination, and preservation stages of an information communication chain. Fans also show an impulse to dynamically archive every step of their activities in the moment. While these fans mainly intend to enjoy their fanworks and support fan creators, their online archival records facilitate broader communications and development of contemporary fan culture while allowing fans to negotiate their own hierarchies in what they believe to be transparent ways

Fandom, Folksonomies and Creativity: the case of the Archive of Our Own

Over recent years Web 2.0 has brought information into the hands of the public, and we are increasingly seeing non-professionals doing sophisticated information tasks not merely for work, research or personal interest, but also for leisure – and even pleasure. This paper looks at an online fanfiction repository, Archive of Our Own (AO3), and investigates the ways that media fans have co-opted new technologies to build a ‘curated folksonomy’ (Bullard 2014), in order to organise the fanworks (fan-created creative works) uploaded by fans to the website. Run by volunteers, the site is a fascinating example of how passion, and even obsession, can bring amateur knowledge workers together collaboratively with users to build an intricate ‘democratic indexing’ system (Hidderley and Rafferty 1997; Rafferty and Hidderley 2007). Through methods of tag analysis and interviews, the paper explores how Archive of Our Own’s curated folksonomy allows fans to make full and creative use of their own original, freeform tags, while also building a highly granular and sophisticated taxonomy which, though highly labour-intensive to maintain, serves the community by maintaining a high degree of accuracy while also preserving the folksonomic properties of freeform tagging. As well as building a functioning taxonomy, through standardising its nomenclature, and facilitating the discoverability of AO3’s collections to its users, these amateur knowledge workers see their domain expertise and knowledge organisation labour as a type of fanwork that ‘gives back to the community’, in lieu of other creative works such as fanfiction and fanart

Beyond the multidisciplinary in fan studies: Learning how to talk among disciplines

In light of the Fan Studies Network's statement regarding fan studies being overrun with whiteness, we are in a unique position to engage in scholarship that challenges the overwhelmingly white and Global North–centric structures that define how we study fan cultures. Multidisciplinarity, which may be understood as disciplines laid side by side, should be contrasted with interdisciplinarity, which requires true dialogue. Despite recent field-shifting work by fan studies scholars such as Bertha Chin, Lori Morimoto, Rukmini Pande, and Rebecca Wanzo, more work needs to be done to both acknowledge and build on current research in transcultural fandom. In a dialogue that reflects the progress of our own striving toward interdisciplinary and transcultural work in fan studies, we seek to demonstrate a possible way forward for the field of fan studies to become more truly interdisciplinary and transcultural in its focus

SLIS Connecting Volume 6, Issue 2

SLIS Connecting Volume 6, Issue 2 (Fall/Winter 2017

Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use

Digital Humanities Initiative Level 1 Start Up funding is requested to support a series of site visits and planning meetings among personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie papers at Emory University's Woodruff Library, the Michael Joyce Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits will facilitate the preparation of a larger collaborative grant proposal among the three institutions aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving and curating the born-digital documents and records of contemporary authorship. Initial findings will be made available through a jointly authored and publicly distributed online white paper, as well as conference presentations at relevant venues

Supporting Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Library

This session discusses Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in the library context. EDI are fundamental values of the library profession and community. The session addresses EDI cases and resources covering various library activities, including library retention, strategies and statements, access services, collection development and metadata creation. It especially focuses on metadata and resource description, as well as introduce the Inclusive Metadata & Conscious Editing Resources List of the Sunshine State Digital Network (SSDN). The purpose is to generate more awareness, interest, and discussion in the library, and create a more inclusive and diversified environment for the library and its served students, faculty members and community at large. It is part of the Stay Savvy with Scholarly Communication Summer Professional Development Series at the University of Central Florida Libraries

Issue 46

On the Shoulders of Giants: To the Moon and Beyond exhibithttps://thekeep.eiu.edu/notebooth/1000/thumbnail.jp