Event Title
Digital Humanities Methods and Fan Studies
Location
CB1-320
Start Date
3-11-2017 1:45 PM
End Date
3-11-2017 3:15 PM
Description
The field of fan studies has a long history of using traditional humanistic tools on digital objects, and recent years have seen the beginnings of a strand of research using technological tools to humanistically examine fans and fandom. The issue of method is somewhat fraught in this field, as in many others, with arguments about whether inquiry should be framed around texts, or metadata, or human subjects, or all of the above.
This solution-focused workshop takes the premise that, rather than prioritizing some questions, objects, or methods over others, we should think of different approaches as having different affordances and limitations, allowing us to see some things (and not others). Presenters will discuss the interrelations between what objects we examine, what tools we use, and what questions we can answer.
At one end of the panel's spectrum of methods and questions, Jingyi Li is interested in applying computation to better understand large fan datasets. For example, how can we leverage advancements in Natural Language Processing for insights on the kinds of content published on the fan work archive Archive of Our Own? How can we best apply computer vision for novel, aggregate visualizations of fan art?
For her part, Sarah Sterman will discuss a web scraper for Archive of Our Own that retrieves metadata and story text. Using this tool in conjunction with close reading and automated text analysis, we can quickly discover areas of interest for closer investigation and large-scale patterns across multiple fandoms, enabling exploratory analysis and distant reading approaches to fanfiction.
Josh Stenger and Tom Armstrong, on the other hand, will discuss some of the limits and possibilities of using data-driven approaches to study multi-fandom fanfiction archives in order to discern otherwise indiscernible aspects of a wide range of fan devotion, practices, and communities: e.g., authorship, genre, reader address and reader engagement; discursive and recursive dimensions of canonicity; the existence of affinity communities within and across fandoms; and ways in which fandoms and fan engagement are becoming integrated into marketing models and content creation.
At the most traditionally humanistic end of the spectrum, Mel Stanfill will discuss a methodology called Big Reading that aggregates close readings at scale. This method allows answering questions about both comprehensiveness, drawing on thousands of cases and examples from multiple types of source across a long period and depth, asking not just whether or with what frequency fans or specific fan practices appear in the archive but how they appear.
After brief introductions to each of these methods and their affordances and limitations, the workshop will move into collaborative discussion among attendees and presenters toward taxonomizing techniques and methods and thinking about how different methods might come up with different answers to the same questions. The session aims to produce a collaborative document on the intersection of fan studies and DH in terms of methods, to move the intersection of these fields forward.
Digital Humanities Methods and Fan Studies
CB1-320
The field of fan studies has a long history of using traditional humanistic tools on digital objects, and recent years have seen the beginnings of a strand of research using technological tools to humanistically examine fans and fandom. The issue of method is somewhat fraught in this field, as in many others, with arguments about whether inquiry should be framed around texts, or metadata, or human subjects, or all of the above.
