In my lab there is a team of researchers interested in the intersection of fat activism and technology! We want to understand the experiences fat people have online and how we can make online spaces better. We’re looking for people to interview and will compensate participants with a $20 gift card. There’s more information at the link, as well as a form to fill out if you’re interested in participating. And please share!
P.S. The drawing is by one of our researchers, isn’t it great?
[Image Caption: Sketch of four fat people in different colours: a fat femme in blue wearing a stylish fedora, a fat femme in red shrugging, a fat masc person in yellow wearing a vest, and an androgynous fat person in purple just leaning in.]
Hello everyone! My name is Brianna
Dym, and I’m a researcher with the Internet Rules Lab at CU Boulder. This
summer, I want to talk to people about participating in activism as part of a
fandom!
I would love to interview you if…
1. You are involved in fandom in some
way, even if it’s just lurking. By fandom, we mean online communities where
people are creating and sharing fanworks like fanart, fanfiction, cosplays,
things like that.
2. You have participated in some kind of
activism as part of your involvement in fandom! This might look like getting
involved in a hashtag campaign, raising awareness for specific issues, getting
involved with a non-profit that grew from fandom, giving to or organizing
donation drives or charity campaigns. There’s a lot of examples, so if you’re
not sure your experience qualifies please reach out through the google form
linked below!
We can conduct the interview on any
platform you want – either text-based chat or voice. Interviews typically last
one hour. You will be compensated with a $20 gift card for your participation.
Whether you participate or not, please consider sharing this call for
participants with your social networks!
And if you’d like to find out more about previous research I’ve
conducted with fan communities, check out these published articles: https://briannadym.com/research-publications/
To volunteer to participate (or if you
have any questions), please fill out this google form. I would absolutely love to speak with you.
Hi! I know it's not your specialty (so please, feel free to ignore this ask), but do you happen to know if it's possible/easy to scrape metadata from AO3 about user interactions? Like an API that will get the usernames of everyone who has commented on /bookmarked/kudosed a work. I really want to do some network analysis on a fandom, to see whether sub-communities form around certain tags, and it seems like something that someone else must be doing!
Hi! AO3 doesn’t have any APIs, nor have they released a data dump with that kind of data – so it all has to be scraped for the moment. I’ve run across a few folks over the years trying to do similar analysis of FFN, but I don’t know of anyone currently looking at this on AO3. Readers, do any of you know of any analysis of this sort on AO3?
You’ll also want to be careful to think through how to preserve individuals’ privacy while doing this kind of analysis – @cfiesler or anyone else, do you have any good recs for best practices?
Oooh I’m glad you asked! @briannadym and I published this paper last year about things to consider when using data from fandom: https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1733 But TL;DR is to just consider what might be sensitive or discoverable if you’re amplifying it.
But I think that doing some network analysis on AO3 data sounds neat! I’ve seen some people publish scrapers on github. But something to keep in mind is that scraping IS against fanfiction.net’s terms of service, but not against AO3′s. AO3 does ask for people to be careful about not overloading them though, e.g. maybe don’t scrape at not peek hours.
For this year’s CHI2020, Casey Fiesler presented a paper on the way that DRM interferes with Computer-Human Interfaces, drawing on the public record from recent US Copyright Office DMCA 1201 comment periods.
The foundational point (I think) is the clash of metaphors. People who buy devices or subscriptions to services believe that they have acquired property and thus should be free to use it as they see fit.
As one Copyright Office comment goes: “The seller only has the right to sell to me if I choose to buy from them. They DO NOT have the right to tell me how to use it. It would be like me buying a house from a contractor and them telling me I could NOT make ANY changes to it.”
There’s a very good reason that people who buy phones - or ebooks or juicers or pet-food dispensers or tractors or smart lightbulbs - think they’re BUYING these things, not taking out a limited use license.
That reason is that the sellers tell them so. “Are you ready to buy this tractor, good sir? or “Buy the ebook now!”
None of these companies pitch their wares as, “Acquire a limited license subject to terms and conditions today!”
But the fine print, the technical countermeasures, and the representations these companies make to Congress and regulators tell a different story.
Companies know that no one wants a limited license to the things they view as property, so they only tell you you’re not the owner of your stuff when you want to use third-party ink, or independent repair, or an alternative app store.
Then it’s all “Well, actually, I think you’ll find that you don’t own this at all. Ha ha! Got you there, don’t I?”
CHI is all about metaphors, from windows to trashcans, and metaphor shear is an occupational hazard at the best of times.
But with DRM, the metaphor shear is deliberate. Companies know you didn’t wake up this morning and say, “Dammit, I wish it was illegal to take my car to an independent mechanic. Wonder what GM’s got to sell me on those lines?”
So GM deploys a deliberately deceptive metaphor to sell you (or, rather, “to offer you a limited license to) a car. The metaphor fails not because it is incomplete or imprecise, but because it is a fraud.
Fiesler’s work is an excellent exploration of the special problems that this culture of fraud creates for designers, users, and, especially, people with disabilities.
somehow I just stumbled onto this on Tumblr, but TL;DR Cory said some nice things about one of my papers last year
As part of celebrating Copyright Week, in this month’s Five Things post Casey Fiesler discusses her work with OTW’s Legal Committee, as well as fandom related work she does outside of the organization. Read more at https://otw.news/five-things-3ba66
Thanks, @cfiesler , for putting together this great set of advice for folks considering applying, or actually applying, to PhD programs! Great job demystifying the process – and also asking important questions up front about whether grad school is the right next step. (As someone who has very mixed feelings about having gone to grad school, I heartily approve of these questions.)
Aw thanks! I really hope these are helpful for people. <3
So Lindsay Ellis’ latest video about DMCA takedowns to her original video about the omegavers copyright lawsuit, including accusations of a FANFICTION DEEPSTATE involving OTW, included in it a totally bonkers fair use analysis that inspired me to make an entire video about not just that specific case, but also explaining fair use generally (in a hopefully accessible way) with a focus on fanworks.
Disclaimer: I am on the legal committee for OTW, but they had nothing to do with this video. They also have nothing to do with the omegaverse lawsuit, and if there is a fanfiction deepstate no one has let me in on it. :(
Here is a video essay about the results as well as my general musings about the “death” of fandom LiveJournal, the rise of AO3, and the possible future of Tumblr. You’ll also find some TL;DR in the link above, or you can even read the entire resulting paper, published now in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction: “Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities.”
And for the serious TL;DR here’s the fancy chart again. :)
I’d love to know what you think! Feel free to reblog with how all this tracks to your own experience, or what your predictions are for the future of fan platforms.
One thing I’m curious about with the mindset of “all platforms rise and fall” is what this means for AO3 itself in the future, since it was made specifically to prevent the need for this phenomenon.
But maybe it’ll happen anyways? There are people who get so vehemently furious over AO3’s donation drives, and who hate the lack of restrictions on content (so long as it is properly tagged). How many of these people don’t know or understand why AO3 exists as it does, and as the years go on how will this ignorance spread? Will younger generations start thinking “this archive is not for me” and move elsewhere? Will AO3 remain when whatever alternative site people use or create meets its own inevitable fall?
Something else I wanted to address was the hub-like nature of fandom, and the pros/cons of such things. In its original form, fandom spaces were very single focused: you had your fanzines, email lists, geocities shrines, livejournal communities, etc. Then fandoms became less centralized with the rise of tumblr. Our feeds stream us content from the people we follow, who share whatever they’re interested in and eventually move onto other interests while remaining on our feeds until we realize either “oh, we no longer have anything in common” or “hey, I want to get into that too”. What this meant was that instead of people leaving the spaces that were for a specific fandom when they were no longer into it, leaving the remaining fans to continue as they were, the fandom experiences we curated for ourselves warped and shifted into things we no longer could recognize. The blog you followed for Homestuck became a Kpop blog, the blog you followed for Supernatural got into Doctor Who and Sherlock as well. Someone you were friends with moved out of fandom entirely. Maybe you’re still following all of them, have dabbled in all the fandom rises and falls, giving your own followers Homestuck and Kpop and Superwholock and the things that are no longer fandom at all. Anyone else remember the days of fandom blogger vs hipster blogger? That rhetoric fell away entirely as the spaces were curated to our own interested became interspersed with all the stuff that would have also had it’s own spaces before: from memes and to resources, aesthetics to politics, to awareness of all the good and bad of the world around you… and the realization that you now have an inability to escape to your fandom space to relax and unwind. I would say that this is what has led to the resurgence in hubs like discord.
And yet not all aspects of fandom are pulling away into our own nooks and crannies. In my experience, many fandoms have moved to twitter, which for me is like setting up a D&D game in the middle of church, or displaying your nudes on the television with the blinds wide open to a busy street at night. Celebrities use the same platform as the people who ship them with other celebrities! RPFandoms… there has to be a better way!
In some ways, it’s good that fandoms have gotten so bold. No longer hiding away in fear of cease and desists. No longer hiding content warnings behind citrus fruit. No one who is in fandom bats an eye at shipping two men together (at least solely on the basis of it being gay). But have we gotten too comfortable? It seems like every year a new petition goes around for people to sign to protect our freedoms on the internet. Some things which on the basic level seem moral and just are very easily used to crush us: us as people, us as internet users, and us as fandom. Because we don’t want another Livejournal style strikethrough that targets fiction writers and abuse survivors as though they were no different from predators.
This comment has gotten away from me. Before I end this I want to mention one of the problems I have with tumblr and twitter style fandom: the lack of archive. How so many fandoms are so hard to keep up with, to track down the past buried under poorly working tags, delete blogs, changed usernames, and years worth of scrolling. How it seems like “you had to have been there” to fully gain that insider knowledge, because there’s a lack of ruins to prove that a particular fandom was a big deal. Sorry to anyone who arrives late to the party. It’s been mentioned before how the lack of fan led archive for art is majorly unfortunate, desperately needed, but currently unattainable.
To wrap this up, I’m one of those people who is clinging to tumblr even as people are moving on to the likes of twitter. I have moved into discord for the newer fandom i’m in, but I do enjoy what tumblr was and is. Maybe I got lucky, and never saw the worst of the tumblr experience based on the blogs I followed. The state of my dashboard right now isn’t really “fandom” at all if I’m being honest. But I know twitter is not the fandom space for me. I’ll drop in now and again to see art, but for now and the foreseeable future, my fandom home base is AO3.
Reblogging some reblogs for insightful commentary!
To address the first issue, FWIW I do find myself far more confident about the longevity of AO3 for fandom - largely because it has the flexibility to adjust to changing fandom needs in a way that a platform built for a different purpose would not. If I had to speculate, I think there are two reasons that AO3 might decline in use as time goes on: (1) better technology for online interaction that the platform can’t keep up with, and/or (2) generational changes, e.g. if younger folks are mostly using other platforms. But I feel pretty good about AO3′s continued survival. :)
Here is a video essay about the results as well as my general musings about the “death” of fandom LiveJournal, the rise of AO3, and the possible future of Tumblr. You’ll also find some TL;DR in the link above, or you can even read the entire resulting paper, published now in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction: “Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities.”
And for the serious TL;DR here’s the fancy chart again. :)
I’d love to know what you think! Feel free to reblog with how all this tracks to your own experience, or what your predictions are for the future of fan platforms.
This is a very good watch. Plus, bonus is Casey absolutely being ADORABLE as she so obviously loves the topic and fandom in general. That is infectious goodness. I will definitely be checking out the links. Because curiosity.
I will say, from the various platforms I have used (yahoo, bulletin boards, ff.net & ao3, LJ, fb, and tumblr…I think that covers them all?), the thing that gets me most when migrating is a sense of loss. It’s not just loss of content (I had some original content go bye-bye on LJ), but it’s definitely loss of community, of feeling accepted somewhere, of feeling like for once, you’ve found a place where you’re not alone. And then all of that is suddenly just gone. And this isn’t to say fandom and flame wars don’t go everywhere - they go where people go, but hopefully, you still find more community than you do hate. I miss people I found in those places.
And honestly, that Tumblr IS flat does have the benefit of being able to wander in and out of new areas and find new people with ease. Naturally, that comes with the pitfall of the creation of highly-regulated content gatekeepers who wind up shutting people down in a platform that most people want to use for the opposite. You will always have to consider that the only way to restrict your content is to post privately, turn off comments, or turn off reblogs. Otherwise, once you let a post out? It’s now open to changes in so many ways.
A post and its reblogs are a perfect example of how ideas branch from a singular source, and then how those ideas branch. How someone chooses to deal with reblogs that add comments of which they disapprove says a lot about how they view different perspectives - are they welcoming or are they aggressively against any other point of view. And are those differences in perspective merely that or are they actively targeting people (hate, sending hate/death msgs, doxing, etc). A difference in opinion is one thing, but the causing and promoting of active physical harm is quite another.
But even with subcommunities, there’s generally an approval process, the community may not be welcoming or it may expect certain behaviors/structures/whatever and consequences to not following those have a similar “hunted” effect. And while it’s fantastic to be in a community of like-minded people in fandom, it stagnates if it’s closed off to random passersby.
And that is where the open platforms fare better with their constant ebb and flow of people. How much have we learned about so many things not in our day-to-day environment by this type of platform? How many ideas, cultures, languages, beliefs? How much history? There is a wealth of information available here in the pits and it’s both widely accessible and frequently, very unadulterated in its honestly. For better or for worse.
Ao3 is a phenomenal platform, but while it allows interaction between creators and consumers, it is not a social platform. It’s the back room of the library or the hidden room of the little hidden library/used book store, where all the gems are hidden. There is bound to be something you like there and every trip there is filled with the excitement of what will I find this time? I would be leery of them trying to do a full social platform side and I think it would be detrimental to what they do and who they are. So wherever fandom goes, I feel we will continue to crosspost and link to Ao3. That they are constantly keeping abreast of new issues with content and legality, as well as their dedicated efforts to not only save content, but maintain access to areas where such things are being restricted, keeps them viable. Their goal is static, but they continually find new ways to get that goal happening in a world that keeps trying to lock it down.
And also, fuck Facebook. Of all the platforms I have tried, it is, hands down, the worst. For so many reasons.
Reblogging some reblogs for insightful commentaries!
cfiesler Said:
