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.