Posts in "Research"

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

Read: scalawagmagazine.org

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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.

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.

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 📝