Fansplaining: Cataloging Fandom
| Podcast Episode | |
|---|---|
| Fansplaining | |
| Prev Episode · Episode #19 · Next Episode | |
| Episode Title: | Fansplaining: Cataloging Fandom |
| Length: | 1:02:19 |
| Featured: | Ludi Price |
| Date: | April 6 2016 |
| External Links: | Episode at Fansplaining.com |
Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Fansplaining: Cataloging Fandoms is a podcast by Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel.
For others in the series, see Fansplaining.
Introduction
"In Episode 19, “Cataloging Fandom,” Elizabeth and Flourish talk to Ludi Price, a librarian and PhD student in information science whose research focuses on how fans collect, tag, share, and otherwise interact with information (e.g., fanart, fanfic, fanvids, facts about their fandoms, etc.). Then they read and discuss two listener comments. Topics covered include crowdsourcing, Jeremy Bentham, why Amazon.com’s search and tagging system sucks so much, yaoi/yuri and shounen ai/shoujo ai, and ageism in fandom."
Links
- Episode, transcript, and show notes: Episode 19: Cataloging Fandom, Archived version
- Promotion post podcast at Tumblr, Archived version
Topics Discussed
- Fandom through a lens of library and information science, specifically information behaviour
- Fannish passion and unpaid labour
- How fans collect and organize information and share it
- Fandom information behaviour tends to be participatory in nature (crowdsourcing!)
- Fan tagging is very specific and helps others find what they might want to find
- Corporate tagging tends to suck
- Fan Studies as a discipline you can go to school for!
- Letter responses:
- yuri and yaoi as terms in Western anime fandom
- Feeling too old for fandom; age ranges in fandom
- Invitation to submit guests for consideration on future episodes
Excerpts
FK: OK, so fanworks are documents, then what’s interesting about fans and the way that they deal with this stuff—it seems like everybody must, everybody encounters and deals with information, why are fans especially interesting in this way?
LP: Well, you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head, because everyone in their everyday lives encounters information, from the books you read to even like bills and just general everyday things like that. Information science in itself as a discipline is more interested in kind of the more professional aspects of that, like how do certain groups deal with finding information. For example how do lawyers find information and what do they do with it. How do teachers deal with information. How do students deal with information.
And it’s only fairly recently that people have started to look into the more everyday aspects of information behavior. How do individuals deal with their own personal information, for example. And there’s also been kind of a movement towards how do people, I don’t know, people who are enthusiasts and hobbyists, how do they deal with information. Because a lot of what they do doesn’t have official channels or official sources, resources to gather information from. A lot of what they do they kind of document themselves and fandom is closely related from an information science point of view to the information behavior of hobbyists and collectors and enthusiasts and volunteers and things like that. Because they work outside of official channels and a lot of what they do is from their own kind of passion about or obsession, dare I say, with something. So yeah, there is kind of an interest in the more informal ways of sharing information in the information sciences. And fandom is a part of that that has been largely ignored, in fact almost totally ignored, and even though people are starting to pick up on that, that's something that I'm interested in.
FK: Does it, do you see any difference with genre fiction? Because something I definitely wondered about was…full disclosure, the thing that bothers me in the eBook universe is romance novels of which, which I think are sort of the closest officially published thing to fanfic, I mean that's how I see them.
LP: Yep.
FK: And I enjoy them for the same, for some of the same reasons that I enjoy fanfic, and so it really grates my cheese to not be able to find romance novels in the same way I find fanfic.
ELM: Grates your cheese, Flourish, wow.
FK: Grates my cheese. And I think that there’s a lot of other romance readers who feel the same way, and I know that because romance readers tend to create their own, like, incredibly complex libraries and have extreme eBook cataloging, like, for themselves, but I haven’t ever seen that for a community out in the public.
LP: Yeah, that kind of ties into some of the studies that have been done on hobbyist collectors and stuff like that. And a lot of what they do they do in a very insular world. The difference between the information behaviors of hobbyists and enthusiasts, et cetera, et cetera, is that fans do it in a participatory way. They will organize and collect and classify and do all this stuff but they will share the fruits of their labor online and say, “This is up for grabs, you can copy this, you can use my vocabulary, whatever.”
Hobbyists don’t tend to do that. I mean they might do in a kind of physical meatspace club or something. But they don’t tend to do it in large scale, en masse movements like fans do. And what you’re saying about romance fiction and stuff like that, I’m sure there are a ton of people out there who have classified and made collections and stuff. But they don’t come together to share that. And I think probably some of the stuff that they are doing would be of great interest to publishers or the eBook creators or whatever.
And I think that this is where the intersection comes with what I’m doing with fans and what we’re saying about romance readers for example.
LP: No no, it’s really interesting cause I think fans are you know, they’re so into their little niche interests or kinks or whatever that fan tagging and fan classification is so highly granular, like it goes into really really specific details so you can find exactly what you want as easily and quickly as you want. And the marketing industry is not geared to that. Even though with the rise of the internet you are able to find, the internet better serves the long tail of what you want more easily, you can find really obscure stuff really easily, I think there’s still a tension with the marketing industry at large. They still kind of, it's still broadcasting to the masses. You could have a potential really small but dedicated community that’s really heavily into this one product. And I’m not sure that many of them have quite grasped that yet. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing.
ELM: I haven’t had coffee yet. So one thing that I do see a lot these days, I think as fan studies gets more visibility—do you identify as a fan studies person?
LP: Not completely, I feel half and half. LIS and fan studies have widely divergent, like, backgrounds and methodologies, you just can't—
ELM: Cause fan studies is usually, it's social science-y, right?
LP: Yeah it’s more media and cultural studies, yeah.
ELM: OK. So that aside I think because it’s gotten so much more visibility recently I see a lot of younger people writing saying, realizing that this is like a viable thing now, yeah? …Flourish is waving at these metaphorical, or these imaginary young people.
FK: Yeah! They’re not imaginary, they’re real!
ELM: It’s exciting to think about, I am approaching what will be my 10 year college reunion, if I had known 10 years ago that this was something that I could have studied it might have changed everything, you know?
LP: Mm-hmm. ELM: And so I’m wondering if you have any, like, advice or resources, I don’t wanna put you on the spot, but in terms of people beginning their academic journeys and wanting to take this stuff seriously, cause I see a lot of confusion.
LP: It’s a very kind of visceral question for me, because I spent a lot of my life just feeling really unhappy with what I was doing and where I was going and then I, I just like, I was so fed up I was like “I want to be a librarian!” Because that’s what I wanted to be originally as a kid, right. So I went back to school and I did the master’s in Library Science and then I got a job as a librarian and then in the space of, the same week as getting the job the PhD proposal acceptance came through and I was like “Wow, I’m doing an information science PhD in fans!” And you know, I still can’t really get over that this is a thing. And if I’m doing this weird subject that I love so much, and I do love it despite sometimes feeling like I want to tear it apart, it’s possible, you know? It's possible to do this if, I mean, a lot of it is luck and circumstance, I never would have gotten into it if I didn’t have a brilliant supervisor who is both a leader in her field, in the field of information science, and also is a fan herself.
But you know, if it’s something that you’re passionate about, if you’re a fan you go and do it, you write your fic, you make your vids, whatever, if you want to go into the academic area of fan studies it’s there, and if you’re passionate about it do what you do as a fan and go for it. Just try and do it, even if things are rubbish sometimes, sometimes you write crappy fic, but you love it, go for it!