Free choice: data analysis

For reasons I still don't entirely understand, I've spent this entire project having a difficult time getting my head around what exactly I meant to do with it, despite a not inconsiderable amount of feedback, a large amount of background knowledge in my digital literacy field, and a reasonable (but probably not long enough) amount of time spent interacting in that field during the semester. So, I suppose, this post is another attempt to figure out what interests me so much about fanfiction, for one thing, and what makes it a worthy field of study.

So, this entry is another way of trying to work that out, this time through analyzing another chunk of data. That's because I have more actual data to analyze, in the form of a fairly short fanfic I finished and posted just this weekend--the first fanfic I've finished in over a year, sadly. I wrote all of it this semester, a significant amount of it during November when I was sort of participating in mini-NaNoWriMo, and as such things tend to do, it became rather longer than I'd intended. A brief exploration of a scene not explicitly described in canon doesn't sound like it should take long, after all, but between lots of internal monologue and a flashback, it clocked in at 2,300 words. (And yet, despite how parts of it were like pulling teeth, it was so much easier than writing a shorter academic paper. Go figure.)

I think the idea for this fic came to me at some point while I was reading or reading about the Twilight franchise, despite the fact that the fic itself has absolutely nothing to do with Twilight but is rather a Harry Potter fic set during Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, fleshing out Remus' return to his wife. I don't remember what specifically brought me to write about this, but it may have been realizing that while I genuinely like the character of Tonks as she's presented in the books, there's not a lot in canon that clearly shows she's not just as blindly obsessed with Remus as, say, Bella is with Edward--or that she has a sense of what is and isn't healthy for her, or even that she's the strong young woman I see in most fanfiction about her. I didn't want to see her as weak or silly; I wanted even less to think that she had anything in common with Bella. (Um...yes, I do have some issues with Twilight; can you tell?)

The actual writing took me a while, mostly because I tended to do it in bursts, often late at night when it was much easier to sleep rather than write. I had to strike a fine balance with both characters, remaining true to their portrayal in canon while still expressing my own personal canon with how I wanted them to act. The romantic elements needed to seem realistic too, not forced or unnatural, which was a bit difficult given that I haven't read a lot in that genre and have written even less. Then it required a little editing--smoothing out rough patches, adding a few necessary paragraphs to the beginning, sticking in several more paragraphs of dialogue where it turned out I'd skipped over something--before I could finally post it. I suspect this sort of process is common to many fanfic writers, or at least the ones I know, although it's by no means common to all writers (for instance, nothing can convince me that a fic about Voldemort and several Death Eaters having a party with pizza and chick flicks is somehow a good idea).

After I posted the finished product to my writing journal, I cross-posted it to several other communities on Livejournal where I might be able to get people to read and comment on the fic. Cross-posting isn't an official Livejournal term or a fandom term per se, although it probably appears most often in fandom-related situations; it simply means that the content in question has been posted in more than one location, such as two communities or a community and a blogger's personal journal. Livejournal has no built-in feature to do this, so it just means that the blogger makes as many new posts as are necessary, each to a different community, copying and pasting the exact same post each time. In my case, I posted this fanfic header to 30 different Livejournal communities:

Title: Only the Cause and End of Movement
Fandom: Harry Potter
Format & Word Count: Fic, 2,000 words
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Remus/Tonks, with appearances by Ted and Andromeda Tonks
Description: Angst with a side order of romantic fluff.
Warnings: Various Deathly Hallows spoilers regarding Remus and Tonks' relationship. Also, did I mention angst?
Summary: Remus comes home for the last time.

(love is itself unmoving, only the cause and end of movement)

In this case, so I don't go crazy trying to remember where I posted it and what comments I got, I wrote the header exactly like this so that anyone who came across it in any of these many communities would click the link and arrive at my writing journal, instead of actually reposting the fic itself to all 30 communities. I've also done this cross-posting over a space of two days, starting with communities I'd already joined and then expanding to others I found through those communities or through Livejournal searches of interests. Some of these are more active than others, although that's true of any online community.

So far, out of these 30 communities (plus fanfiction.net) where I've posted this fic, I've received these comments:

MaidenStar:
This is a really awesome, well written oneshot and I really loved it =) I think this has to be one of the best Remus-returning-to-Tonks fics I've read, which I think is mainly to do with the way you captured Tonks and her reaction to Remus coming home. I liked that you didn't want her to seem foolish and shallow because that's not how I like to see her character either. This was a gem of a oneshot, thanks for posting!

piratecatarina: Love love love it. Please write lots more.

eternal_moonie: totally awesome!

pretty_panther: I love it. Beautiful work!! And a really realistic take on them both that you don't get often. I love it:)

ladielazarus: Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I loved the style of it, as well. Well done, all around. :)

catastrofica: i've almost cried reading your fanfiction.
Remus is absolutely stupid by his fears, but i still love him, and, of course, with my dearing Dora.
great job. <3
(sorry my awful english, but i'm a brazilian reader. =P)

sspring92: Just lovely. you rally captured the inner turmoil of Remus and the strength of Tonks. I love her telling him she won't let him do this to her child and that he needs to make up his mind! Love to see more from you! Are you signed up at metamorfic_moon Christmas Cracker event?

lilyrin: I love Remus!! =DDD
Nice story. >3< Really liked it!! <3

faeriemaiden (commented by retweeting my link to my fic on Twitter, rather than leaving comments on the fic itself): ♥! Remus/Tonks, Eliot references, angsty delicious AWESOME. RT @100_indecisions http://theturningworld.livejournal.com/12214.html
Go forth to read this fic(& comment); it is gorgeous. Only the Cause & End of Movement(Remus/Tonks) by @100_indecisions http://bit.ly/8oH2q0

What I find interesting here is that I have, thus far, posted this particular fic to more communities than I have any of the others, thereby exposing it to the widest potential readership, but it's received a proportionally smaller number of comments. "The Lost Boy," by contrast, was only posted in 8 places but received at least 19 comments and an award. The two fics are of roughly the same length, and both involve the Harry Potter fandom, but the new fanfic is Harry Potter only, focusing on a tense moment in Lupin and Tonks' relationship, while "The Lost Boy" is a Harry Potter/Doctor Who crossover that details a child's minor adventure. I actually would have expected a basic piece of Remus/Tonks angstfluff to get more attention than a crossover, since crossovers do tend to narrow a potential audience further: they must be familiar with both fandoms and be open to the possibility of crossing the two, for instance. I would also expect the Harry Potter fandom in general to be pretty active, given that it's the largest category at fanfiction.net and the movies are keeping it in the public consciousness, but it's also possible I didn't post in the right places or Remus/Tonks simply isn't as popular as I'd like.

I was pleased by the fact that more than one commenter related having not seen a similar situation in this sort of fic before and agreed with my portrayal of Tonks, at least; I also seemed to get a slightly higher proportion of detailed reviews (by which I mean, more detailed than "Love it!" or the like). And oddly enough, I also got a review on a much older fic, apparently from someone who came across my writing journal through one of my cross-postings--but not only did she not comment on the fic I'd actually posted, she would have had to do a considerable amount of browsing in my writing journal to find the one she did comment on. But anyone who's actually read this far is probably going ANGELS AND MINISTERS OF GRACE PRESERVE US, ENOUGH WORD VOMIT NO ONE CARES, so I'll stop.

Polished analysis

Given that my data, methods, and in fact entire project are a little different from others' and, in fact, I don't have much in the way of traditional quantitative data...well, or for that matter, I'm not even sure how much I have in the way of traditional qualitative data. Whatever exactly that might be. (Look, I was a lit major, I don't know what I'm doing with these things.)

However, the primary data I did gather that's a little more quantifiable than "Hey look, I have a crush on fictional characters and it totally shows, watch me write about it" was the reviews I received from re-posting/cross-posting previously published fanfics. I did organize all of it into a data sheet that I'd really love to embed, except I don't know how, and probably it got lost in the flood of text when I originally posted it.

So here it is again: a data sheet breaking down the comments I received so they're a little easier to see and quantify. It's also a PDF so I guarantee everyone can view it. Although my commenters don't add up to a large enough pool to be a truly representative sample, the comment breakdown is still interesting--it's immediately obvious that virtually all of my reviewers were female, for instance, which came as no surprise to me. While I suspect the gender ratio varies from fandom to fandom and has also varied over time (I've gotten the impression that the sort of people who wrote fanfiction for fanzines in the pre-internet area were primarily male, for instance), it seems that the bulk of active internet fandom today is female, as are the majority of those who write fanfiction. This seems to hold true even in fandoms that might be seen as appealing to the stereotypical male nerd, such as Doctor Who: it's science fiction, after all, which I believe also began as a male-dominated field. In this case, it may have something to do with the preponderance of female readers in general, although that's pure speculation.

Of course, it's also possible that a decent amount of males also read my fanfics and simply didn't comment, which I'd have no way of discovering, but the fact that more females commented probably says something.

The communities where the commenters found these fics may also be significant, although it's a little more difficult to determine since they didn't all start from the same point; there were only two or three places each to post "The Lost Boy" and "Too Close to the Moon," while "No Splendid Phoenix Wings" had only been previously posted in two locations and could then be posted to six additional communities. However, the majority of comments on that fic came from the communities DWFiction and/or doctorwho, which is where most of the new comments on the longer fics also came from. Perhaps more interesting, the non-fandom-specific communities--those open to fanfics from any fandom or even any kind of fiction--garnered me no new comments, even though they probably have a larger readership; since they're less specific and focused, they also gained me a much less targeted readership.

As for the actual content of the comments, the fact that they were all positive was certainly nice for my ego and my confidence as a writer, although given that the majority of the comments were simple praise (i.e., "Loved it!!!" or "Oooh... Nice!") with nothing specific and nothing resembling negative feedback or criticism, that may say more about the reviewers themselves than about me and my writing. Reviewers who provided specific feedback, even if it didn't necessarily tell me what could use revision, were at least the most satisfying--knowing what you did well is just as useful as knowing what you didn't do well, in just about any field.

Methodology

The actual methodology that I followed in collecting the data that I did--as presented in my data sheet, primarily--is similar to further research I would plan to do, although my beginning data analysis didn't count any of the ways I moved in fandom more casually during that time period. I spent more time than I should have last night re-reading Cleolinda's Twilight Saga recaps, for instance, which is certainly a fandom-based, fanfiction-related activity but isn't necessarily related to my own writing and review-gathering. For that matter, I probably talk about or read something fandom-related every single day and barely realize it because it's so integrated into my normal daily experiences.

1) Site--Where did you conduct your research? Why? Because my project was an autoethnography that focused on my own experience as a writer of fanfiction, I didn't limit myself only to one website (although I did carry out most of my interactions within the extremely broad confines of the blog host Livejournal); instead I looked at how my work was received across various fan communities at varying levels of specificity.
2) Participants--Who did you study in your project? Why? That's an easy one: myself, and my own experiences as a fanfic writer and fandom participant. At the same time, though, I had to look at others since fandom is, by definition, a community experience, so I was studying my interactions with others as well.
3) Self--What role did you play in your site? In some ways, I was the site, just like I was the subject of study. I tracked my experience as I wrote and edited fanfiction (well...at least that was always the intention) and as I received reviews on it when I posted it in different places.
4) Data--What kinds of data did you collect? How did you collect it? For the most part, my data centered on the comments and reviews I received; I organized and analyzed them by determining the the gender of the commenter and where she (because usually it was a she) found my fic in the first place.
5) Analysis--How did you analyze your data? As described above, although I didn't carry it nearly as far as I'd like to; looking at how my fics seemed to garner certain kinds of attention would be good, and while I did sort the comments by gender and community to some extent, I didn't do much in the way of drawing conclusions from that data...aside from the fact that the overwhelming majority of commenters were female, which was no surprise, since the areas of fandom that I frequent tend to be predominantly female anyway. For that matter, the areas of fandom that have the most fanfiction, fanart, etc. tend to be populated largely by females anyway.
6) Tradition(s)--What major research tradition(s) did you draw upon to conduct your study? I really had no idea, before I did some preliminary research for my extremely preliminary literature review, that fanfiction and fandom in general had been studied so extensively. Rebecca Black is one of the most important academic figures in the fanfiction discussion, and Henry Jenkins is a major figure in academic discussions of fandom, although the traditions I drew from more tended to be the insider traditions of fandom and fanfiction itself.

Preliminary synthesis of related research

Maybe unfortunately for my purposes, fanfiction has been studied far more extensively than I'd realized, at least from what appear to me to be outsider perspectives. The sources I examine--as well as the overall focus of my project, I guess--will need to be narrowed and focused more closely, especially because there is such a wealth of research on this topic, enough to get fairly overwhelming. One quick search of the library's database of journal articles turned up some 85 articles, for instance, many of which looked at least somewhat relevant--and adding some existing resources from a previous class (ENGl 476) and other articles I've come across, I'll have a considerable amount of material to go through.

So in the interests of situating myself in this conversation, I guess I'll just post the list of possible resources, for now--it's a long list, like I said, so there's no analysis right now, but it should give some idea of what's out there for me to work with. I'm also thinking of turning this into a paper for PacRim, given the emphasis on third space and intertextuality.


Black, Rebecca. "Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction."

Thomas, Angela. "Blurring and Breaking Through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction."

Other possible sources from our book:
Hammer, Jessica. "Agency and Authority in Role-Playing 'Texts'"
Knobel, Michele and Colin Lankshear. "Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production"
Alvermann article, and study on two girls writing fanfic cited in there

Transformative Works and Cultures: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc (may also look at other sites by the Organization for Transformative Works, like Vidding History and Fanlore)

Access and affiliation: The literacy and composition practices of English-language learners in an online fanfiction community. By: Black, Rebecca W.. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Oct2005, Vol. 49 Issue 2, p118-128, 11p; DOI: 10.1598/JAAL.49.2.4; (AN 18508925)
full text

The Slash Fanfiction Connection to Bi Men. By: Davies, Raven. Journal of Bisexuality, 2005, Vol. 5 Issue 2/3, p195-202, 7p; (AN 19108668)

Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context. By: Stein, Louisa; Busse, Kristina. Popular Communication, Oct-Dec2009, Vol. 7 Issue 4, p192-207, 16p; DOI: 10.1080/15405700903177545; (AN 44620499)

When Harry Met Bella. By: Burns, Elizabeth; Webber, Carlie. School Library Journal, Aug2009, Vol. 55 Issue 8, p26-29, 4p, 1 color; (AN 43698156)

Should Fan Fiction Be Free? By: DE KOSNIK, ABIGAIL. Cinema Journal, Summer2009, Vol. 48 Issue 4, p118-124, 7p; (AN 44227396)

USING SOCIAL NORMS TO REGULATE FAN FICTION AND REMIX CULTURE. By: Hetcher, Steven A.. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Jun2009, Vol. 157 Issue 6, p1869-1935, 67p; (AN 43801509) (full text)

Slashing the Fiction of Queer Theory: Slash Fiction, Queer Reading, and Transgressing the Boundaries of Screen Studies, Representations, and Audiences. By: Dhaenens, Frederik; Van Bauwel, Sofie; Biltereyst, Daniel. Journal of Communication Inquiry, Oct2008, Vol. 32 Issue 4, p335-347, 13p; (AN 34151961)

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. By: Hills, Matt. Popular Communication, Oct-Dec2008, Vol. 6 Issue 4, p262-263, 2p; DOI: 10.1080/15405700802240451; (AN 34741416)

Selections from Dreamsongs: Fan Fiction and SciFi from Martin's Early Years.
Stories of Fantasy, Horror/Sci-Fi, and a Man Called Tuf.
Wild Cards and More Stories from Martin's Later Years. By: Lord, Douglas C. Library Journal, 4/1/2008, Vol. 133 Issue 6, p120-121, 2p; (AN 31574270)

Everyone's a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of "Mary Sue" Fan Fiction as Fair Use. By: Chander, Anupam; Sunder, Madhavi. California Law Review, Apr2007, Vol. 95 Issue 2, p597-626, 30p; (AN 24806545)

The Fan Fiction Phenomena. By: Young, Cathy. Reason, Feb2007, Vol. 38 Issue 9, p14-15, 2p; (AN 23632753) http://reason.com/archives/2007/01/30/the-fan-fiction-phenomena

Fan fiction online: Engagement, critical response and affective play through writing. By: Thomas, Angela. Australian Journal of Language & Literacy, Oct2006, Vol. 29 Issue 3, p226-239, 14p; (AN 22317451)

Rewriting the Rules of Fiction. By: JURGENSEN, JOHN. Wall Street Journal - Eastern Edition, 9/16/2006, Vol. 248 Issue 65, pP1-P4, 2p, 1 chart, 1 color; (AN 22362650)

Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenom. By: MacDonald, Marianne. Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Jan/Feb2006, Vol. 13 Issue 1, p28-30, 3p; (AN 19362052)

Filling the Gaps: What's Happening in the World of Fan Fiction. By: Collins, Tara. Library Media Connection, Jan2006, Vol. 24 Issue 4, p36-38, 3p; (AN 19363573)

Decoding Desire: From Kirk and Spock to K/S1. By: Woledge, Elizabeth. Social Semiotics, Aug2005, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p235-250, 16p; DOI: 10.1080/10350330500154857; (AN 17926969)

Spike, sex and subtext. By: Williamson, Milly. European Journal of Cultural Studies, Aug2005, Vol. 8 Issue 3, p289-311, 23p; DOI: 10.1177/1367549405054863; (AN 18033365)

Slashing the Romance Narrative. By: Kustritz, Anne. Journal of American Culture, Sep2003, Vol. 26 Issue 3, p371-384, 14p; DOI: 10.1111/1542-734X.00098; (AN 10351834)

Fanfic: Is It Right to Write? By: Razer, Helen. World Press Review, Mar2004, Vol. 51 Issue 3, p39-39, 1p, 1 bw; (AN 12384932)

Resistance Re-Examined: Gender, Fan Practices, and Science Fiction Television. By: Scodari, Christine. Popular Communication, 2003, Vol. 1 Issue 2, p111, 20p; (AN 9771550)

Confronting Enterprise Slash Fan Fiction. By: Lee, Kylie. Extrapolation (University of Texas at Brownsville), Spring2003, Vol. 44 Issue 1, p69, 14p; (AN 9895643)

CREATING A POCKET UNIVERSE: 'SHIPPERS,' FAN FICTION, AND THE X-FILES ONLINE. By: Scodari, Christine; Felder, Jenna L. Communication Studies, Fall2000, Vol. 51 Issue 3, p238, 20p; (AN 4094240)

Black, Rebecca. Online Fanfiction: What Technology and Popular Culture Can Teach Us About Writing and Literacy Instruction. New Horizons for Learning, March 2005. http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/literacy/black.htm

Black, Rebecca. Language, Culture, and Identity in Online Fanfiction. E-Learning. Vol. 3.2, 2006.

"John Rogers on fanfic: re: Leverage." http://cerusee.livejournal.com/235907.html

"Transmedia: a brave new world in entertainment marketing." http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-henry-jenkins22-2009nov22,0,4168038.story

I also remember posting two good links to Twitter for future reference...but because Twitter doesn't have a good search function, I can't find them. >_<