OTW Guest Post: Patrick Doyle
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | OTW Guest Post: Patrick Doyle |
| Interviewer: | Claudia Rebaza |
| Interviewee: | Patrick Doyle |
| Date(s): | March 21, 2019 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | |
| External Links: | "OTW Guest Post: Patrick Doyle". Archived from the original on 2019-08-14.; archive link |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
OTW Guest Post: Patrick Doyle is a 2019 interview done as part of a series. See OTW Guest Post.
Some Topics Discussed
Some Excerpts
Some of your work has involved LGBT YouTubers and their experiences with coming out. What did you study?
Given my own experience with coming out online before coming out in the “real” world, I was really interested in investigating what that process was like for people who had a much bigger audience than I did. Specifically, I wanted to learn about the digital environment that YouTube content creators built when they posted their video to their millions of subscribers. This project, which my co-author Andrew Graham and I are still working on, is made up of two parts: the audience comments and the creator interviews.
I downloaded close to half a million comments from some of the most viewed coming out YouTube videos of all time in an effort to understand what people were talking about in the comments section. Since taking a more traditional approach to this kind of research by reading each comment would take an absurdly long time, I ran some fancy statistics to create linguistic themes that I could explore. That analysis suggested that, overwhelmingly, the comments were full of support and kindness…except for a select few that were loaded with terms about hellfire. Luckily those were few and far between.
The next step was to meet with some of the posters of these videos to understand what their motivations were for posting and the experience that they had before, during, and after the video went up. We set up a handful of interviews with these content creators and talked about the process. We’re still working on data collection for this phase so I can’t talk about the initial results quite yet, but it’s definitely been an eye-opening project.
What fandom things have inspired you the most?
I’m going to answer this question in two ways: as an observer and a participant. I was lucky enough to join the singer Daya on her Sit Still, Look Pretty tour for a few weeks where I helped out with merchandise sales and meet and greet sessions which is where I had the observer experience. Seeing, every single night, the look on fans’ faces when they would have a few seconds to hug their idol really helped remind me of the social power of these celebrities. The only part of the night better than that was watching an entire crowd sing along to a song. That always gave me chills.
As a participant, there was no bigger rush than when a new album would drop from one of my favorite artists. My friends from across the world would all log-in to listen together, sharing posts about our favorite songs or what we thought certain lyrics meant. I absolutely think about those days when I write about the way people find other people like them who support their interests and hobbies.