When is a gap not a gap? Doing research that hasn't already been done

An undergrad sent me a message thanking me for my post A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow and asked the question:

Is there an exhaustive way of making sure that the literature gap you have identified is genuinely a gap?

The short answer is, no. There isn’t. But there are ways to get close.

In my experience, the best way to begin is with a specific research topic in mind, but before you have fully developed a question. You get familiar with the literature using the tips from step 4 in my workflow: Identify potential literature.

  • Consult with a trusted colleague.
  • Search databases.
  • Search Google Scholar.
  • Follow citations backwards.
  • Follow citations forwards.

After you look at the abstracts for these and eliminate the ones that are outside the scope of your topic, pay close attention when you’re doing your Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion extraction reading to suggestions for future research. In my experience, this is the most fruitful way to find gaps. Both my Master’s paper and dissertation research questions were suggested in the future research section of other scholars’ work.

As H. L. Goodall says in Writing the New Ethnography,

To locate a gap in any scholarly literature requires that you read a lot. (emphasis original)

Goodall offers some more specific advice as well:

  • Start with the most recent literature.
  • Notice which things are referenced repeatedly - the references all the most recent work has in common.
  • Make a chart of names, relationships to institutions, and arguments.
  • Look for patterns of citations, themes, and topics.

I don’t think I can give better advice than that. I’ll close out with more from Goodall:

You are reading for the storyline. You may not be sure what you are using it for, at least not yet. But that is all right. Be patient. Ideas, and uses for them, often take time.

You are also reading to find out what is collectively written about an idea, what individual voices have to say about that collective idea, and for an opening that you can address.

There’s no shortcut, I’m afraid. You have to jump into the literature before you know what the gap is. When everything you’ve read is referencing everything else, it’s safe to trust you’ve got a good sense of the topic and know where the gaps are.

More than a little psyched about Emily Vardell & Sarah Beth Nelson’s paper Teaching Reference Interview Skills with Improv.

I love my job and some yammering about writing

How are you doing, Internet? I’m obviously Not Okay, with my mom having leukemia and all, but I’m trying to do things besides worry about her anyway. I’m doing pretty well at that.

Have we talked about how much I love working for the Connected Learning Lab? Maybe we have. I’ll say a little more about it anyway. I styled myself for this type of position throughout my PhD program, in spite of having no expectation that such a position would be available. I always live a better life when I just do whatever is interesting or exciting to me and let professional opportunities arise as they may. (Woo-woo types would say this is because my Human Design type is Projector and I would not argue with them.)

My job is to read about what’s making it hard for teen librarians to support connected learning in their libraries, interview them about it, analyze a bunch of data from my reading and interviews, and work with a team to develop tools to help teen librarians with this. It is dreamy as can be. Teen librarians (and librarians who serve teens and others as well) tend to be pretty awesome, based on my encounters with them. On their best days, they want to make space for what lights teens up. (On their worst days, I would guess they probably just want to go home. Being a school or public librarian is really hard as well as being rewarding.)

I do feel a need to figure out what’s next, which is why I’m doing Jen Polk’s PhD Career Clarity program. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for this as a student, but my consulting/content development work with Quirkos paid enough that I could actually afford it. Yay!

My previous explorations with ImaginePhD have indicated that writing, publishing, and editing is a good career family given my skills and interests, and I don’t disagree. I still find myself attracted to the idea of being a freelancer, so I’m doing some thinking and planning and learning about what that would look like. The ideal situation for me would either be enough consulting to cover the bills paired with writing as a creative outlet, or some sort of dream job instead of the consulting. I don’t think I want to depend on freelance writing for my income, but I do think I want to get words out of me and in front of human people.

Blogging even on days when I don’t have A Topic in mind is a gesture toward that. So is doing Morning Pages, and the Artist’s Way more broadly. (I’m still doing that at my very glacial pace.)

I’m reading through Joanna Penn’s Author 2.0 Blueprint and the posts and books she mentions in it. I’ll probably pick Bird by Bird up soon. I thought I’d read it before, but it’s not on my list of books I’ve read. I know I have a paperback copy somewhere but I think it’s lost in a pile of stuff in the attic, so I’m going to buy the ebook for my Kobo, too.

I definitely idealize writing as an art form. I don’t know a way around that, and I’m not sure I want to. I don’t have this idea of a person who spends all their time sitting in a garret writing, because as I learned when I was doing improv, you have to go experience life if you want to make art about it. (You could make art about sitting in a garret, I suppose.) When I watched Hamilton, the thing that stood out for me that for some reason had eluded me in listening was writing as a throughline in the whole story. The lyrics “I wrote my way out” and “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” had made an impression, of course, but something about seeing it brought it out as bigger than a leitmotif. What’s bigger than a leitmotif? I don’t know. Something really big.

There was some other art that I was thinking about that has contributed to this idealization, but I don’t know what it is. Definitely the story of Donna Tartt spending so much time on her writing at Bennington College was part of it.

Anyway. I am unapologetically romantic about writing as art and craft, but very realistic about the ways in which it can be a career.

How are things going for you?

🔖 Read As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

This 1945 essay by Vannebar Bush is one of the first texts they had us read when I got my MS in Library Science.

Notes and highlights

A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it,

every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine

Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine.

There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Bush points out that indexing systems and rules do not duplicate the human mind - we must convert our own mental associations to a form we can use to search them - but that the human mind works by association. I extrapolate from this the idea of hypertext as a model of how the mind works. I’m going to keep an eye out for other instances of this idea.

if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

How many people use Evernote as a Memex?

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word.

This is tagging.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

It me! This is kinda what people who operate as web librarians do. Web librarian isn’t my job title or description, but it’s just kind of who I am.

His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

This is one of my difficulties. I put a lot of stuff in my blog-as-memex but don’t have a good way of surfacing them again. Theoretically I could do this with categories, but that gets overwhelming fast. This is why I’m thinking about using a blog and a wiki together for this purpose.

He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good.

I fear this is so.

Future Directions for Connected Learning in Libraries

This is the fourth post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning.

Here are all the posts published so far:

  1. What Is Connected Learning?
  2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
  3. Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

There are a number of opportunities for connected learning to grow in libraries. Here I’ll discuss some of them, beginning with the one most relevant to my current work.

Research-Practice Partnerships Research-Practice Partnerships allow library professionals to develop connected learning environments and programs in collaboration with researchers of learning and information sciences. The project I’m working on, Transforming and Scaling Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (TS4EDI) is one such partnership. Myself and other researchers at the Connected Learning Lab, including PI Vera Michalchik and Research Manager Amanda Wortman, are working with state librarians in Rhode Island and Washington first to identify barriers and challenges to libraries creating CL environments and programs and then to develop resources to help library professionals overcome those barriers and challenges. The state librarians will recruit local public librarians in their state to be part of this partnership, and those public librarians will recruit youth to participate, as well. Other examples include the ConnectedLib project and the Capturing Connected Learning in Libraries project.

Brokering Youth Opportunities in Libraries Connected learning research over the past 10 years has highlighted the importance of caring adults or peers as brokers or sponsors for youth as they build their networks surrounding an interest. These brokers/sponsors can connect youth with other people and resources to help them expand their network and identify opportunities for learning and achievement related to their interest. Current research literature doesn’t explicitly offer guidance on brokering as a distinct activity, investigate the extent to which librarians currently act as brokers, or illuminate how youth may serve as peer brokers in the library setting. Research-practice partnerships and library professional-led professional development could address these questions.

Bringing Connected Learning to School and Academic Libraries So far, connected learning has been documented mostly in informal settings. A few studies have looked at connected learning in formal settings, but those tend to be individual classrooms rather than school or academic libraries. One area that offers potential for CL in these settings is the connection between interests and information literacy. This was the focus of my dissertation, in which I examined the information literacy practices of cosplayers. Cosplayers engage in connected learning as they learn about their interest, build relationships with each other, and find opportunities to contribute to the cosplay community or even become professional cosplayers. Throughout these elements of connected learning, cosplayers engage in information literacy, identifying resources, evaluating them, and even creating new resources. Because school and academic libraries are the primary center for information literacy education in their institutions and because they are not tied to a specific academic discipline, they have the potential to create opportunities for connected learning as learners build their information literacy practices.

That’s all for this series of blog posts, but I expect to write a lot more about connected learning through the course of my work at the Connected Learning Lab, so if you find this interesting, stay tuned!

Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

This is the third post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far:

  1. What Is Connected Learning?
  2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
  3. Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

While libraries are poised to be environments conducive to connected learning, they may need to undergo further shifts to expand their support for connected learning. This involves a number of considerations:

Resources. Library professionals must consider not only physical and digital resources, but human resources as well - using “resource” to describe a person the same way we might use it to describe a book or a website. Library professionals can serve as a point of connection between learners, mentors, and other people in the environment beyond the specific context of the connected learning activities.

Technology and space. Current library policies may need to be updated to enable learners to engage in shared practices, socializing, collaborating, and publishing their work online.

Evaluation. Libraries have traditionally focused on quantitative measures of impact, such as how many people attended a particular program. These measures may not be sufficient to capture the impact of connected learning. Measures of connected learning need to capture the way learners move with their learning across settings beyond spaces controlled by the library; identifying specific desired outcomes can facilitate capturing evidence of and communicating the impact of a program. Qualitative data such as interviews or open-ended survey questions may capture this impact better than or alongside quantitative measures.

Role of library professionals. Library professionals must learn to consider themselves as sponsors and brokers of youth learning rather than mentors or authority figures. This means helping youth find other people and communities to support their learning and focusing on enhancing learning rather than enforcing behavior-based policies.

Program design. To create programming that fosters connected learning, library professionals may need to co-design with youth rather than deciding programming in advance and offering it to youth without their early input.

Competencies. The creators of the ConnectedLib project identified the following necessary competencies for library professionals to support youth’s connected learning:

  1. …they must be ready and willing to transition from expert to facilitator…
  2. …[they] need to apply interdisciplinary approaches to establish equal partnership and learning opportunities that facilitate discovery and use of digital media…
  3. …they should be able to develop dynamic partnerships and collaborations that reach beyond the library into their communities…
  4. …they should be able to evaluate connected learning programs and utilize the evaluation results to strengthen learning in libraries… (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 19)

Professional development. Library professionals often will not have been trained in these competencies during their education, so they may need to continue their own learning via in-house professional development, programs provided by professional organizations, open online learning resources, and formal educational experiences. The ConnectedLib toolkit is one example of an open online learning resource directed at meeting this need, while the University of Maryland’s Youth Experience In-Service Training is an example of a formal educational experience designed to build these competencies.

I identified these potential shifts to library practices in response to a number of challenges libraries face in developing and implementing connected learning programming, including:

Attracting teens to skill-building programming. For some advanced interest-based experiences, youth need a foundational set of knowledge. For example, to create a sophisticated video game, a teen would first need a foundational understanding of game design and computer programming. It is a challenge to attract novice learners to this kind of programming.

Working with technology. Library professionals may lack the digital tools they need due to library policy, may know how to design or facilitate technology-focused or -infused programming, or may not feel comfortable acting as effective digital media mentors.

Unfamiliarity with the Connected Learning model. Library professionals may struggle with integrating all the different spheres and elements of the model. They may not have the knowledge, skills, or training they need to successfully implement the model.

Culture clashes. Teen culture may sometimes clash with library culture, requiring library professionals to negotiate these conflicting cultures to create programming that has a strong impact in teens’ lives.

The next and, I think, final post in this series will address future directions for connected learning in libraries.

How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries

This is the second post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far:

  1. What Is Connected Learning?
  2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries

The first element of connected learning is interest. Libraries explicitly support the exploration of personal interests in both their collections and their programming. The second element is relationships. Libraries are intergenerational spaces that can be (but aren’t always) inclusive of people from nondominant groups. Libraries can serve as a bridge that connects formal and informal learning. Libraries are increasingly spaces where youth can have shared experiences creating new knowledge. They are third places, neither school nor home, where youth can gather, connect around their shared interests, and meet adult mentors and sponsors who can help them leverage a variety of resources in pursuing those interests.

A note about third places in the time of COVID-19: For many of us (the luckiest among us, I would argue), there is only one place: home, which is also work, which is sometimes also school, which is also where we do whatever social activity we do. This is certainly true for me. That said, online library programming can act as a virtual third space, a place to go for something that isn’t all about home or work responsibilities. I’ll be interested to see how scholarship around this shift evolves. A quick search for “‘third places’ COVID” on Google Scholar demonstrates that scholars are already thinking about this, including in the specific context of public libraries. I am exercising extreme restraint to not jump down a rabbit hole of exploring that research right now.

There are some examples of connected learning happening in both public and school library spaces. If you’d like to explore them, here are some links:

The next post in this series will discuss some of the challenges of creating connected learning experiences in libraries and some shifts libraries may need to undergo to provide more connected learning experiences.

What is Connected Learning?

I start working remotely for the Connected Learning Lab tomorrow and while a lot of people are excited for me, most of them don’t actually understand what I’m going to be doing. So I’m writing a blog series that I hope will explain that somewhat, and this is the first post. If you’ve read my comps chapter on Connected Learning or seen my Connected Learning and the IndieWeb talk, some of this will be familiar.

Connected learning can be conceived of in three ways: as a type of learning experience that occurs spontaneously, as an empirically-derived framework for describing that type of experience, and as a research and design agenda aimed at expanding access to that type of learning experience. My brother-in-law, P., is actually a phenomenal example of a Connected Learner.

In high school and college, P. was interested in playing guitar. He started hanging out at a local guitar shop, connecting with a community there of peers and mentors. Through the connections he made, he was offered the opportunity to be lead guitarist for a tribute band, and that job took him all over the world. He has since embarked on a different but related career, working in media law. This area of law might not have been of interest to him if he hadn’t had experience working in the music industry.

That’s an example of a spontaneously occurring connected learning experience. From experiences like this, scholars have created a model to describe connected learning. This model includes three elements of connected learning: interests, relationships, and opportunities. P. was interested in music, built relationships at the guitar shop, and it led him to opportunities to perform as part of a working band and become a lawyer.

A Venn diagram demonstrating three elements: interests, relationships, and opportunities. The center of this diagram is labeled Connected Learning.

Image Source: The Connected Learning Alliance

This type of experience is easier to access with more financial and temporal support; the research and design agenda surrounding connected learning is an equity agenda that aims to broaden the availability of this kind of experience, making it possible for nondominant youth who might require additional support to access connected learning. One way to do that is to bring this kind of experience into public spaces serving nondominant youth - public spaces like libraries.

The work I’m doing with the Connected Learning Lab is part of a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services examining key needs for teen services in libraries:

(1) the challenges library staff face in designing and implementing CL programming for underserved teens and the means for overcoming these challenges, (2) ways library staff can use evaluative approaches to understand youth needs in CL programming, and (3) the means of demonstrating the value of CL programs and building stakeholder support for increasing their scope and scale, particularly to serve equity goals.

The products of this research will include

training modules, guidebooks, mentoring supports, case studies, videos, practice briefs, topical papers, and blogs.

These are some of my favorite kinds of things to create, so I’m extra excited.

My next post in this series will talk about how Connected Learning is already happening in libraries, with some examples from actual libraries.

Thanks to Jennifer Polk’s co-working session, I made big progress on a paper revision today. 📝

My post-PhD identity crisis, #motherscholar edition

I am making a few notes here now that I hope to turn into a longer post later. As I scrolled Twitter and read there what some colleagues have been working on, I started to feel my current post-PhD existential crisis take a new and unexpected shape: the shape of wishing I knew a way to stay in academia.

Here are the things that have kept me from pursuing an academic career after graduation:

  • watching tenure-track colleagues be miserable
  • lack of mobility (it would be very challenging to find a position, even tenure-track, that would be worth uprooting my family for, and I refuse to live apart from my family)
  • being a mother (I also refuse to prioritize career over family)
  • being chronically ill/variably disabled (I also refuse to prioritize career over health)

Here are the things that today appeal to me about academia:

  • pursuing a research agenda that I design

That’s actually about it, and as a freelance academic/independent researcher, I can probably work out a way to do that but today it feels like it’s in conflict with everything else I’ve got going on.

Which is why I’m going to dive into the #motherscholar literature.

More on that later.

– Read

Meet the Southern librarians fighting for racial justice and truth-telling – Scalawag scalawagmagazine.org

Read: scalawagmagazine.org

.

Read this because it’s on Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Human-Information Interaction syllabus for this semester. (I like to look at updated syllabi for classes I’ve already taken to see what I might have missed recently.) Going to pull out a couple of quotes that stuck with me. I hope in time I’ll write a more robust response to this article.

The public rarely sees the many processes that happen behind the scenes at libraries—which cultural priorities inform decisions of what to include in a collection, or to digitize; which books to display; which films or speakers wind up on the calendar—all of these choices are determined by the priorities designated by the library leadership. And, of course, their biases play a part.

The ALA isn’t a worker’s union. It’s an association that includes everyone from paraprofessionals to directors of large systems. Several people told me that as library workers, they didn’t feel represented by the organization—far from it.

Response to "Knitting’s resurgence reflects women’s desire to confront inequality": things that have been things for a while, affinity space research, and punk rock new domesticity

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

I’m writing up a response to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Nebraska Today article, Knitting’s resurgence reflects women’s desire to confront inequality. This is a super off-the-cuff response that I hope to shape in the future into a proper essay but I need to get ideas out now or I may never bother.

I’m probably going to do this as sort of a list of thoughts.

Please note: I have not read the study referenced here, which according to its abstract looks like it focuses on consumers' use of space (hence the focus on yarn shops, stitch & pitch, etc) to “contest… cultural devaluation.” What the abstract describes and what the news piece talks about overlap, but certainly don’t appear to be identical. I hope to read the article soon.

  1. Re: the framing of knitting as “an activity often dismissed as dull busywork for elderly women.” Maciel first noticed the phenomenon of Tucson knitters (which, due to Tucson’s climate, seemed like a counterintuitive phenomenon - and I grant him that) in 2011. This was 8 years after the publication of Debbie Stoller’s book Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook and 6 years after the publication of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter. Kim Werker founded the online magazine Crochet Me in 2004 because the world was full of cool stuff for knitters and not for crocheters. The website Craftster was founded in 2000. The Internet Archive has snapshots of the forum get crafty dating back to 1999. CROQzine began publication in 2005. Faythe Levine’s companion book and documentary, both titled Handmade Nation, came out in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Researcher Andre F. Maciel “learned that millions of women have taken up the hobby during the past two decades,” but a lot of this news piece frames it as if he’s discovered something wildly new. (The fact that part of his data collection included reviewing “640 articles about knitting found in large-circulation newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and the New Yorker” makes it clear that this was not a novel phenomenon in 2011 and still is not in 2021.) Again, I haven’t read the journal article; perhaps it does not treat the new domesticity as a hidden secret that only he and his colleague discovered in the past 10 years.

  2. “Martha Stewart and others led a New Cult of Domesticity that embraced household endeavors such as cooking, baking, fiber crafts and home decorating.” This is the first time I’ve heard of the new domesticity referred to as the New Cult of Domesticity. Also, while Martha Stewart definitely was a big part of the most mainstream stuff happening here, she doesn’t exhibit the punk rock ethos that I associate with the new domesticity.

  3. “They are contesting this cultural inequality, the stereotypes of knitting. It’s not in a radical way — they are not joining social movements as hard-core activists; they are not breaking social ties. They are not radical feminists; they are not abandoning their traditional roles. They want to reclaim the value of women’s culture.” I expect this kind of generalization is the natural outcome of a newsy piece as opposed to a scholarly piece; presumably Maciel and Wallendorf address the limitations of their study in the journal article. For example, their survey found that “Of the 110 knitters who responded to Maciel’s survey, 87% held a college degree and two-thirds lived in households with earnings of about $90,000. Most of them were white, most held conventional middle-class jobs, and most lived in committed relationships. About half had children living at home.” But it’s worth noting that when it comes to surveys " …women are more likely to participate than men (Curtin et al., 2000; Moore & Tarnai, 2002; Singer et al., 2000), younger people are more likely to participate than older people (Goyder, 1986; Moore & Tarnai, 2002), and white people are more likely to participate than non-white people (Curtin et al., 2000; Groves et al., 2000; Voigt et al., 2003).” (G. Smith, 2008) (PDF) So there may be a disparity between who knits and who responded to the survey. There is work out there specifically on craftivists. While perhaps the participants and respondents in this study were not radical, that’s not to say that crafters in general aren’t. (Don’t even get me started on the terminology of “make” vs. “craft,” that’s a conversation for another post.)

  4. This is clearly affinity space research. When conducting research on an affinity space, there are plenty of potential challenges to doing ethical research. Taking this sort of traditional anthropological outsider view is out-of-step with the best affinity space research I’ve seen. This study is billed as an ethnography and I’m curious to see how the journal article frames it and how it addresses research ethics.

As I said, this is a gut response. This piece and especially the journal article it references deserve more attention.

I’ve made my Conceptual Synthesis Spreadsheet Notion template available via Gumroad. It’s pay-what-you-can/want. This spreadsheet is based on Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Article-Introduction-Conclusion/Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method.

Personal reflections after (but not really on) #FanLIS

My head is swimming after attending the #FanLIS symposium today. At this moment when I’m taking a few weeks off before launching consulting, occasionally doing job interviews, and mostly resting, I’m in the middle of an existential crisis about what I want to do and who I want to be.

I’m in a position where, if I can bring in a fair amount of freelance work, I could use some of my time as an independent scholar and I think that’s what I want to do. I’m not interested in academia-as-institutionalized-in-higher-ed but I love scholarship. I don’t want to not be a scholar.

I’ve been reviewing my notes from Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s Book The Freelance Academic and this quote is standing out to me today:

Our tracks are, by necessity, only limited by our own creativity. They literally are what we make them. (p. 49 in the Kindle edition)

So this is my track today. Freelance academic/independent scholar-librarian.

Tomorrow: Digging into Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog for help setting up my workflows moving forward.

Most of my tweets from #FanLIS

I’m planning to return and clean up formatting and add links to videos once they’re online, but for now, here’s a collection of everything I tweeted from the presentations at #FanLIS, handily compiled and tweeted for me by Noter Live.

Ludi Price 柏詠璇:

introducing #FanLIS - fans are information workers par excellence

Leisure interests are important to study because they are what we choose to do and are no less important than any other aspect of our lives: work, health, etc.

Fan information work is a subset of fun information work.

How can we harness the passion fans have for solving the problems of LIS? Can we?

#FanLIS seeks to explore the liminal space where fandom, fan studies, and LIS interact and can hopefully learn from each other. What do we know? Where should we go next as a field of research?

Colin Porlezza:

They examined methods reported in Journal of Fandom Studies & Transformative Works and Cultures. Used computational analysis to scrape all keywords for both journals & inductively analyzed sample of 50 abstracts. Compared with a similar study in journalism.

Eleonora Benecchi, PhD:

20 most often occurring keywords tended to focus on research setting, media or media type, phenomenon investigated

Top theory keywords include gender, ethics, participatory culture, cultural theories, feminism, CRT, queer theory, and more. Significant overlap between theory keywords in fan studies & journalism but not in overall keywords.

Wide variety of methods employed in fan studies. Of those named specifically, ethnography is most frequent, then terms referring to specific methodological techniques (interviews, content analysis, etc). Only methodological perspective present aside from ethnography & its subtypes is case study

Colin Porlezza:

Dominant perspectives are sociology, culture, economics, language, history, technology

Most studies don't cite a specific theoretical perspective but many theories are used in the ones that do.

Abstract often lacked reference to specific research methodological approach. Ethnography & case studies. Discourse analysis & textual analysis dominant as well.

Eleonora Benecchi, PhD:

Conclusion: explicitly naming theoretical & methodological approaches in keywords & abstracts makes fan studies more visible to other disciplines. We should tag our research as carefully as we tag our fanfic.

Using IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format for abstract increases likelihood of paper being read.

Magnus Pfeffer:

discussing project to explore possiblity of taking data generated by enthusiast communities and creating knowledge graph for researchers to use

Examples of visual media enthusiast data repositories include Visual Novel Database, AnimeClick, Anime Characters Database

Enthusiasts had positive response to project, wanted to cooperate to make data available with an intermediary who can bridge expertise between enthusiasts and researchers.

Used RDF format of Entity - Property - Value.

Each community has its own data model. Goal is to examine all of these, which vary according to domain (manga vs anime vs visual novel, etc) and create data model that can be used across domains.

Custom web front end allows researcher to retrieve data. Human-readable labels appear instead of actual data which makes exploration easy.

Can identify identical entities mentioned in multiple enthusiast data sources. Goal is to combine them into single entity.

All data is linked to original enthusiast source, enabling researchers to verify info and even interact with enthusiasts.

Want to maintain specific source ontologies rather than trying to impose a particular perspective on enthusiast data.

Share Alike requirement in CC licenses present a challenge. (I'd love to hear more about this. Would applying a CC license to the knowledge graph handle this?)

Project website: https://jvmg.iuk.hdm-stuttgart.de/

Aris Emmanouloudis:

Using lenses from fan studies and platform studies to look at the rise and fall? and preservation of Twitch Plays Pokemon.

Twitch Plays Pokemon is a crowd-sourced set of commands being sent to control Pokemon Red. Fans created a narrative/meta-text around the game on other platforms.

Twitch Plays Pokemon moved on to other games after Pokemon Red and inspired Twitch Plays Street Fighter and Twitch Plays Dark Souls. Big decrease in participation for Twitch Plays Pokemon over time.

RQs: What are the affordances that allowed the TPP community to emerge? How did the fans act as archivists?

Qual research including looking at user-generated content, observation of stream and chat, and interview with anonymous streamer who established TPP.

Brum's affordances of produser communities present in TPP: open participation, unfinished, meritocracy & heterarchy, communal property. (Did I miss one? Regardless, this reminds me a LOT of Gee's affinity spaces.)

argues that lack of holding to accepted Twitch standards and choosing to improvise contributed to decrease of participation.

Fans served as volunteer curators, while official channel administrators mostly focus on technical content and don't engage much with metanarrative.

Conclusions - this is a hungry culture, not originally designed for expansion, small passionate group of fans remains, visiting past gameplay & nostalgia factor brings community together/revitalizes.

Dr. Nele Noppe/ネラ・ノッパ🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈:

What if we used fannish platforms to publish scholarship?

Brainstorming doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/19PbNM8WwUVR8J4PDkm2w0Y9cLHa6sVoRt02ivgGdj9A/edit#heading=h.ihz2vfxozzxq

The open access workflow and results are v. similar to for-profit workflow and results. "We recreate a mirror image of for-profit scholarly publishing."

We're constantly trying to prove that open access can be high quality. (What if we actually reimagine scholarly publishing? What if we make something so different it doesn't invite comparison?)

Fan publishing and academic publishing have enough in common that fan publishing can help us reimagine scholarly publishing.

Dr Alice M. Kelly (she/her):

Talking about affect and its centrality to fanfiction. (Making me think of my #NSFEITM work with @marijel_melo and @theartofmarch and I'm wondering how widely affect is present in LIS research in general.)

J Nicole Miller 💜🤍🖤:

talking about fanfiction and info seeking behaviors of young adult readers

suggests that methods for fanfiction info seeking can illuminate creation of library services & support

RQs: How do YA find fanfic to read? How do they find fiction to read? How do those methods differ between each other? Are there differences between experienced fanfic readers and new fanfic readers?

Pilot study with YA ages 18 - 23. Semistructured interviews. 90% of participants began engaging with fanfic & online fandom in high school.

50% found fanfic via serendipity (Tumblr, Google, etc) and 40% via friends. (This connects with the importance of friends in my research on cosplay information literacy.)

AO3 is clear winner for fanfic reading among participants. Apparently podfic has migrated to YouTube?

None of participants went to librarians for book recs. (Oh my heart is breaking!)

Paul Thomas 🦇:

On Adventure Time: "As you can see, the show makes total sense." AHAHAHAHAHAHA

Using analytic autoethnography. Sometimes gets flack from others who perceive autoethnography as not being rigorous.

importance of roles and hierarchies in determining how to include/cite sources in wiki articles; how to

Abigail De Kosnik:

Talking about individual as library & librarian and individual as archive & archivist

In a time of collapse (like now), we need to think about how people will preserve media and visual culture. The people doing this work are more likely to be pirates than institutional actors.

Critics & legal opponents of archives are not framed as individuals, but are instead described as communities, collectives, and corporations.

Oof the rhetoric of using libraries as stealing if you're not too poor to buy books. Yikes.

Individuals feel responsibility for cultural preservation and distrust institutions to do it; systematic disinvestment in public preservation institutions fuels this.

Academic libraries should learn from pirates' and fans' examples. Reject exploitative pricing models.

Fans should take their fandom and love really seriously and think about whether they can be archivists or want to be archivists.

You can now watch my dissertation defense presentation! I’ve stopped the video before the Q&A to protect my committee and guests' privacy, but if you want to see the version with questions included, DM or email me and I’ll send you the link.

Submitted my dissertation to the university. Ordered Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic from Rofhiwa Bookcafé to celebrate. 📚 📝🎉

So I’m reading my dissertation and I think it’s… Good? Like it was written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about? I take this as evidence that I know what I’m talking about. 📝

About to start reading and marking up this thing in preparation for next week’s defense, at which I will boldly go where (to my knowledge) no Hirsh has gone before. 📝

I have now met all my pre-defense scholarly obligations (paper draft & guest lecture) so I guess it’s time to prepare for my defense. googles makeup tutorials 📝