Confronting the challenges of participatory culture

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Smith on Jenkins, 'Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture'

[0.1] Abstract—As online fandom continues to grow, so do the public data created by fan creations and interactions. With researchers and journalists regularly engaging with those data (and not always asking permission), many fans are concerned that their content might end up in front of the wrong audience, which could lead to privacy violations or even harassment from within or outside of fandom. To better understand fan perspectives on the collection and analysis of public data as a methodology, we conducted both an interview study and a survey to solicit responses that would help provide a broader understanding of fandom's privacy norms as they relate to the ethical use of data. We use these findings to revisit and recommend best practices for working with public data within fandom.

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Ethical and Privacy Considerations for Research Using Online Fandom Data.

Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is taking place online in novel and unexpected ways. In order to understand and analyze in more detail how learning might be occurring, we conducted an in-depth nine-month ethnographic investigation of online fanfiction communities, including participant observation and fanfiction author interviews. Our observations led to the development of a theory we term distributed mentoring, which we present in detail in this paper. Distributed mentoring exemplifies one instance of how networked technology affords new extensions of behaviors that were previously bounded by time and space. Distributed mentoring holds potential for application beyond the spontaneous mentoring observed in this investigation and may help students receive diverse, thoughtful feedback in formal learning environments as well.

Thousands of Positive Reviews: Distributed Mentoring in Online Fan Communities

In this study two new measures of lexical diversity are tested for the first time on French. The usefulness of these measures, MTLD (McCarthy and Jarvis (2010 and this volume) and HD-D (McCarthy and Jarvis 2007), in predicting different aspects of language proficiency is assessed and compared with D (Malvern and Richards 1997; Malvern, Richards, Chipere and Duran 2004) and Maas (1972) in analyses of stories told by two groups of learners (n = 41) of two different proficiency levels and one group of native speakers of French (n = 23). The importance of careful lemmatization in studies of lexical diversity which involve highly inflected languages is also demonstrated. The paper shows that the measures of lexical diversity under study are valid proxies for language ability in that they explain up to 62 percent of the variance in French C-test scores, and up to 33 percent of the variance in a measure of complexity. The paper also provides evidence that dependence on segment size continues to be a problem for the measures of lexical diversity discussed in this paper. The paper concludes that limiting the range of text lengths or even keeping text length constant is the safest option in analysing lexical diversity.

Chapter 3. Measuring lexical diversity among L2 learners of French

Fanfiction.net provides an informal learning space for young writers through distributed mentoring, networked giving and receiving of feedback. In this paper, we quantify the cumulative effect of feedback on lexical diversity for 1.5 million authors.

Reviews Matter: How Distributed Mentoring Predicts Lexical Diversity on FanFiction.net.

Communities focused on creating and sharing fanworks have existed since before the internet, but have thrived in the presence of online platforms. From young people learning literacy skills through writing fanfiction about their favorite media to complex infrastructural work in fans creating their own platforms to longstanding social norms that promote inclusivity, these communities showcase many core interests of CSCW-however, there has been little research focused on fandom within social computing and HCI. This panel brings together scholars who have conducted research related to online fandom to discuss their experiences, the challenges they have faced, and the vast opportunity for more work in this area from a range of perspectives.

Online Fandom: Boldly Going Where Few CSCW Researchers Have Gone Before

Relationships form the core of connected learning. In this study, we apply and extend social network analysis methods to uncover the layered network structure of relationships among this http URL authors and reviewers. this http URL, one of the world's largest fanfiction communities, is a space where millions of young people engage with written media, connect over shared interests, and receive support and mentoring from a distributed audience. Does an affinity space such as this http URL have the same structure as social networks Facebook and Twitter? We applied k-means clustering on millions of relationships to determine that this http URL has 2 to 3 layers, in contrast with the 4-layer structure of Facebook and 5-layer structure of Twitter. In addition, we conducted a large-scale machine classification of this http URL reviews to reveal the types of mentoring exchanged in each layer. Our findings show that the relationships where reviews are exchanged most frequently are most likely to contain substantive reviews. We discuss implications of these findings for the theory of distributed mentoring as well as the design of online affinity networks.

Ruby Davis

Papers

Reviews Matter: How Distributed Mentoring Predicts Lexical Diversity on FanFiction.net.

Online Fandom: Boldly Going Where Few CSCW Researchers Have Gone Before

Mentorship Network Structure: How Relationships Emerge Online and What They Mean for Amateur Creators.