Kimberly Hirsh logo Kimberly Hirsh

Want to read: Fibershed : growing a movement of farmers, fashion activists, and makers for a new textile economy 📚

Here’s your (somewhat) regularly scheduled voting selfie!

03/02/20 Process Memo

I spent some time this morning installing encryption software so that I can encrypt the data files I will be backing up onto an external hard drive.

I created a spreadsheet to track the initial sources for my sustained, systematic observation and entered the resources Kroski (2015) mentions. I noted the title, author, URL, type (book, tutorial, blog post, etc), and whether the resource was part of a larger portal (e.g. YouTube, Instructables, Pinterest).

As you might expect of a 5 year old book, a few of the resources are now unavailable. Not a lot else to report today, and I expect this piece of the work will continue for a few more days before I start actually taking notes using my observation protocol.

Having a low spoons day today, so I’m working through a bunch of fiddly, errand-type to-do list stuff rather than getting knee-deep in data collection. But I have been reflecting on just the beginnings of this research process somewhat.

I’m an old hand at turning fun into work and vice versa. I did it with my first career as a Latin teacher, and then when I was a Latin teacher and picked up reading and blogging about kidlit and YA lit as a hobby, I became a school librarian. If things had gone differently at my job after that, I was going to steer my work in the direction of the Maker Movement and STEM-to-STEAM. In my two qualitative methods courses, I wrote my final papers about improv, which was my (incredibly) dominant hobby at the time.

Some people find that when they do a thing as a job, they don’t love that thing anymore. But not me, usually. (If I stop loving the thing, it’s less to do with the thing itself being my work and more to do with the work environment.)

So when I decided to make my research about cosplay, it was not a little bit because I knew that if I made cosplay part of my work, I would prioritize it more than I had in the past, and that’s definitely happened.

As part of looking at the resources Kroski recommends in her book, Cosplay in Libraries, I have found myself getting really excited about the possibilities for my own cosplay in the future. While everyone I’ve interacted with around cosplay has been immensely kind, it can be hard to feel like you’re capable of jumping in. There are so many possibilities for techniques you might use when you transition from styled cosplayer (where I still am right now) to cosplay maker, and I’m looking forward to having these resources at my fingertips to help me dig in more.

I think Gillian Conahan, author of The Hero’s Closet, tries to learn a technique with each costume she makes, and that’s my goal, too. For Oak City ComiCon, I’m putting together a Kitty Pryde (Sprite) costume and a Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew) costume. For Kitty Pryde, I’m going to learn 3D printing and painting a 3D printed item. For Spider-Woman, I’m going to learn to use craft foam to modify glasses.

🔖 Read:

02/28/2020 Process Memo: Beginning sustained, systematic observation

I began my sustained, systematic observation today by gathering my initial resources for this phase.

First, on my Dissertation Trello board in my Sustained, Systematic Observation list, I created a card called “Collect initial resources.”

On this card, I created a checklist and including the following types of sources to use to identify resources:

LIS sources

Cosplay sources

  • Convention websites to review for guest or cosplay group names
  • Groups mentioned in Kroski 2015, such as Star Wars groups the 501st & Rebel legions
  • Sources identified by Googling “Marvel cosplayers” and browsing the first 10 pages of results. Kroski refers to her own cosplay “origin story” as being when she participated in a call for Marvel cosplayers for an episode of Cake Boss. This mention is why I Googled Marvel cosplayers.

Next, I began a close reading of Kroski 2015 to look for resources she suggests/mentions. This includes specific lists of tutorials related to particular techniques, books she mentions, apps, and references in her endnotes that are cosplay resources such as blog posts. I am flagging these with Post-it flags and will enter them into a spreadsheet before beginning using my observation protocol.

I will also need to perform the observation protocol on Kroski 2015 itself.

Just skimmed Parenting Doesn’t Matter, the main premise of which is that according to science, your parenting is unlikely to be the thing that messes up your kid. It reminded me of an argument I hear sometimes for a variety of possible parenting choices that makes me grouchy: “I [insert whatever here] and I turned out okay.” For example, “I was bullied in elementary school and I turned out okay.”

This rhetoric seems to me to rely on the assumption that childhood experiences only matter to the extent that they impact our adult lives. But I take issue with this assumption.

Children are not raw material waiting to be formed into real people when they reach adulthood. They are full-on human beings, with emotions and thought processes, and they deserve to have positive experiences NOW, not just when they are adults.

So when I have the opportunity to make life better for my kid, I don’t ask myself whether I turned out okay in spite of not having the experience I’m considering. I ask myself how it will impact his life NOW.