Chosen research site

After looking around at the sites I was considering, I've picked Gallifrey Base--ff.net is called the Pit of Voles for a reason, and though I (and many very good writers) do use it as a fic repository, I suspect the quality of discussion in its forums would be...well, fairly low. The LJ community would likely have a better level of discussion, as well as a wide range of fannish behavior/activities to observe and participate in, but because it's a blog community rather than a traditional forum, its organization is likely to be more hit-or-miss--with a community that big, keeping up with tagging posts and adding them to memories (the only real ways of organizing posts in Livejournal) would be difficult, so participating or getting a feel for the site as a whole would be harder.

Gallifrey Base, though, is an enormous forum for the Doctor Who fandom with dozens of subforums on virtually every conceivable topic of discussion. Members can post different kinds of fanwork (fanart, mixes, fic, roleplaying games, vids), discuss the old and new shows and all their accompanying spinoff media, speculate on future developments, and so on. I expect to see other common hallmarks of fandom there as well, such as image macros, fandom-specific language and slang, and shipping discussions if not outright ship wars (I imagine the moderators do a fairly good job of keeping that down, but it's possible to discuss shipping in a civil manner, as well as to discuss fanwank going on in other corners of the fandom without actively participating in it). The forum has thousands of members and almost all of its subforums appear to update daily, indicating a very active community. I'm not sure what the general demographic of the users is, although with so many users, it probably covers a fairly wide range.

Having recently joined this particular forum does put me in a slightly odd position--I've been in the Doctor Who fandom for at least two years now, and a member of fandom in general for at least five years. I'm familiar with fandom conventions and with many of the conventions specific to the Doctor Who fandom, although less so than with others because the show itself stretches over such a long period of time (including Old Who and New Who, it's one of the longest-running shows in history, going almost unbroken from the 1960s to today) and gets even more complicated when you factor in all the spinoff media--novels, comics, specials, audios, semi-affiliated alternate-universe worlds, additional spinoff shows and their spinoff media, and so on. I'm not familiar with the entire range of the fandom, so while I'm not an outsider in that sense, I'm not an insider in the same way someone who has watched the entire run of the series from the beginning would be. In addition, I joined Gallifrey Base very recently, after I came across it in a Google search when I was trying to determine my options for this project, and to one extent or another, all forums and other corners of fandom have their own specific conventions and quirks with which I'll be unfamiliar. In some ways, I'll have the simultaneous experience of being an insider and a newbie (though not, I hope, a n00b).

As for my own participation, I'll begin simply by browsing the forum and lurking a bit to see what sorts of discussions are going on and what the particular rules are, after which I'll participate in the discussions as they interest me (and with a new season of The Sarah Jane Adventures airing next month, Doctor Who specials with the last of David Tennant's run coming up soon, and the Eleventh Doctor starting up next year, I imagine there'll be a lot to talk about). I've also written a few Doctor Who fanfics and crossovers, so I'll post some existing fic for feedback and work on creating new fanfic, as well as giving feedback for fanworks that others have posted.

Possible sites for investigation

As I stated in my introductory post, I plan to look into fandom as literacy, especially fanfiction and some of its offshoots, and while I might occasionally bring in other sites, I'll be focusing on the fandom for the British sci-fi cult classic Doctor Who (both the old series and the revived version, as well as its spinoffs). The fandom is spread across dozens of different websites, as most fandoms are, but I'll be focusing on the particular pocket of fandom that has taken up residence on one specific website. I've narrowed the possibilities down to a few different sites:

• FanFiction.net: This website, an oft-derided repository of fic from hundreds (maybe thousands) of different fandoms, includes some 16,000 Doctor Who fanfics, user-maintained communities in each fandom, and fandom-specific forums. Although a study of the site as a whole would be nearly impossible because it's so large and diverse, restricting myself to the Doctor Who fandom as represented at ff.net should be feasible.
  
• doctorwho: the livejournal community about doctor who and stuff: Livejournal hosts dozens of Doctor Who communities and dozens of multifandom comms that include this particular fandom, but doctorwho is easily the largest and most inclusive Doctor Who community on this blogging site. Members regularly engage in discussion across broad topics of the fandom and post fan-created works such as fanfics. Other aspects of fandom, like ship wars, fanwank, macros, fanart, RPing, sporking of badfic, and fanmixes are likely to show up here as well. Rather than being a forum per se, however, this is a community blog that allows members to post individual entries, which other members then comment on.
  
• Gallifrey Base (members-only forum): This looks like a very large forum for Doctor Who fans, covering all levels of discussion and fan-created works. Because I only joined it very recently, I'm not sure how suitable it would be, although it does appear very active.

there will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet

That subject line alone should tell you--if my blog title didn't already--that I'm something of a nerd about many things literature-related, especially the poetry of T.S. Eliot. I'm fascinated by language in general and how it develops in actual usage, in particular in the context of slang and idiom, and the effect of new technologies on language definitely comes into play there. As an internet user and member of several fandoms myself, I enjoy watching language and memes evolve almost in real time. For this specific project, I plan to study fanfiction and the general phenomenon of fandom that surrounds it, especially the way language and behavior has affected and been affected by fandom developments. Fandom itself is huge and nebulous, so I intend to focus on the Doctor Who fandom, dedicated to a science fiction show from the UK that is more than broad enough to cover the spectrum of fannish behavior.

testing one, two

This is only a test. Not that anyone's seeing it yet...