InfoSci Student, Fan, Public Scholar

Hello everyone! My name is Brianna Dym, and I’m working with the BITS Lab at Syracuse University. This summer, lead researcher Dr. Bryan Semaan and I want to talk to people about being part of LGBTQ communities involved in creative writing, fandom, or both! As you may know, I’m also a proud member of the LGBTQ community and a long-time creative writer both in and out of fandom. I want to hear other people’s experiences in what has been such an important online community for me.

We would love to interview you if…

You are part of the LGBTQ community

You are involved in fandom as a fan fiction writer, or write original fiction in online communities, but we are also interested in talking to fan artists and cosplayers

You have moved to, joined, or even created your own online community spaces while in fandom. These spaces might look like discord channels, google docs, or even communities on Tumblr.

We can conduct the interview in the medium of your choice – either text-based chat or voice. You also don’t have to answer questions you don’t want to, and can stop at any time. We will ask for some basic demographics (any of which you can decline to answer), but won’t require any identifying information. If you feel comfortable with it, we might also ask you to share a few of your fan works with us. We expect this interview to take approximately one hour. You will be compensated with a $20 Amazon gift card for your participation in the study.

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, see this Tumblr post.

You can sign up to participate using this google form, if you want. Otherwise, to volunteer to participate (or if you have any questions), please email [email protected] or [email protected]. We would absolutely love to speak with you. This study will help us not only understand your experiences, but will also help us identify ways to help members of the LGBTQ community.

Sincerely,

The BITS Lab @ Syracuse University Brianna Dym and Dr. Bryan Semaan

If you do not receive an email from us, it is because you marked that you are younger than 18 and are therefore ineligible for this study.

Thank you so much everyone for spreading this around and I’m absolutely honored by the response we got. So many amazing volunteers! You’re wonderful people.

Image by Hannah Craig (2014)

Vol 27 (2018): Tumblr and Fandom, Edited by Lori Morimoto and Louisa Ellen Stein

Editorial

Lori Morimoto and Louisa Ellen Stein, Tumblr and fandom

Theory

Evan Hayles Gledhill, Bricolage and the culture of the margins in the romantic era and the digital age

Bo Allesøe Christensen & Thessa Jensen, The JohnLock Conspiracy, fandom eschatology, and longing to belong

Christopher M. Cox, “Ms. Marvel,” Tumblr, and the industrial logics of identity in digital spaces

Praxis

Tosha R. Taylor, Digital Space and Walking Dead fandom’s Team Delusional

Rebecca Williams, Tumblr’s GIF culture and the infinite image: Lone fandom, ruptures, and working throu­ gh on a microblogging platform

Indira Neill Hoch, Content, conduct, and apologies in Tumblr fandom tags

Natalie Chew, Tumblr as counterpublic space for fan mobilization

Jessica Hautsch, Tumblr’s Supernatural fandom and the rhetorical affordance of GIFs

Symposium

Lily Winterwood, Discourse is the new wank: A reflection on linguistic change in fandom

Elizabeth M. Downey, Sheryl Lyn Bundy, Connie K. Shih, Emily Hamilton-Honey, A “Glee”-ful collaboration: Academic networking in the Tumblr world

Daisy Pignett, “Remember a week ago when Tom Hiddleston could do no wrong?” Tumblr reactions to the loss of an Internet boyfriendi

Judith May Fathallah, Polyphony on Tumblr: Reading the hate blog as pastiche

Paul J. Booth, Tumbling or stumbling? Misadventures with Tumblr in the fan studies classroom

Mélanie Bourdaa, Tumblr as a methodological tool for data archiving: The case of a Calzona Tumblr

Lori Morimoto, Roundtable: Tumblr and fandom

Book review

Anne Jamison, “Rogue archives: Digital cultural memory and media fandom,” by Abigail De Kosnik

Samantha Anne Close, “Cult media, fandom, and textiles,” by Brigid Cherry

Hye-Kyung Lee, “Transnational audiences: Media reception on a global scale,” by Adrian Athique

Hello everyone! My name is Brianna Dym, and I’m working with the BITS Lab at Syracuse University. This summer, lead researcher Dr. Bryan Semaan and I want to talk to people about being part of LGBTQ communities involved in creative writing, fandom, or both! As you may know, I’m also a proud member of the LGBTQ community and a long-time creative writer both in and out of fandom. I want to hear other people’s experiences in what has been such an important online community for me.

We would love to interview you if…

You are part of the LGBTQ community

You are involved in fandom as a fan fiction writer, or write original fiction in online communities, but we are also interested in talking to fan artists and cosplayers

You have moved to, joined, or even created your own online community spaces while in fandom. These spaces might look like discord channels, google docs, or even communities on Tumblr.

We can conduct the interview in the medium of your choice – either text-based chat or voice. You also don’t have to answer questions you don’t want to, and can stop at any time. We will ask for some basic demographics (any of which you can decline to answer), but won’t require any identifying information. If you feel comfortable with it, we might also ask you to share a few of your fan works with us. We expect this interview to take approximately one hour. You will be compensated with a $20 Amazon gift card for your participation in the study.

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, see this Tumblr post.

You can sign up to participate using this google form, if you want. Otherwise, to volunteer to participate (or if you have any questions), please email [email protected] or [email protected]. We would absolutely love to speak with you. This study will help us not only understand your experiences, but will also help us identify ways to help members of the LGBTQ community.

Sincerely,

The BITS Lab @ Syracuse University Brianna Dym and Dr. Bryan Semaan

Hi Tumblr,

We’re all grappling with the influence that state-sponsored disinformation campaigns can have on our political conversations—and how wide-spread that interference turned out to be. So please take a moment to read this, think about it, and talk about it.

Last fall, we uncovered 84 Tumblr accounts linked to the Russian government through the Internet Research Agency, or IRA. These accounts were being used as part of a disinformation campaign leading up to the 2016 U.S. election. After uncovering the activity, we notified law enforcement, terminated the accounts, and deleted their original posts. Behind the scenes, we worked with the Department of Justice, and the information we provided helped indict 13 people who worked for the IRA.

Now that the investigations are done, we want to let you know how we’re going to help protect Tumblr in the future and what you can do to help.

Here’s what we know about these accounts

The IRA employs more than 1,000 people who engage in electronic disinformation and propaganda campaigns around the world using phony social media accounts. Their goal is to sow division and discontent in the countries they target. What makes them so difficult to spot is that they’re not spambots. They’re real people who get trained and paid to spread propaganda.

As far as we can tell, the IRA-linked accounts were only focused on spreading disinformation in the U.S., and they only posted organic content. We didn’t find any indication that they ran ads.

Remember, the IRA and other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns play off our zero-sum politics. They want to drive a wedge between us so that we spend our time fighting with each other instead of building towards the future. We’ll be watching for signs of future activity, but the best defense is knowing how they operate and how to judge the content you see.

What we’re doing in response to the interference

First, we’ll be emailing anyone who liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed an IRA-linked account with the list of usernames they engaged with.

Second, we’re going to start keeping a public record of usernames we’ve linked to the IRA or other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. We’re committed to transparency and want you to know everything that we know.

We’ve decided to leave up any reblog chains that might be on your Tumblrs—you can choose to leave them or delete them. We’re letting you decide because the reblog chains contain posts created by real Tumblr users, often challenging or debunking the false and incideniary claims in the IRA-linked original post. Removing those authentic posts without your consent would encroach on your free speech—and there have been enough disruptions to our conversations as it is.

What we’re doing to stop future disinformation campaigns

You’ve probably read that U.S. intelligence officials expect foreign agents to try similar propaganda campaigns in the future. We’ll be monitoring Tumblr for signs of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, and if we see anything we will…

Terminate the accounts and remove their original posts.

Notify you if we determine that you’ve liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed a propaganda account.

Add the username to the public record.

Alert law enforcement.

There are also things you can do to help stop the spread of disinformation and propaganda.

Be aware that people want to manipulate the conversation. Knowing that disinformation and propaganda accounts are out there makes it harder for them to operate. The News Literacy Project has this handy checklist for spotting their tricks.

Be skeptical of things you read. Disinformation campaigns work because they know people don’t fact check. Look for reliable sources, and double-check that the source really says the same thing as the post. You can also check Snopes and Politifact. Both are award-winning resources and usually have the latest viral claim fact checked on the front page. 

Correct the record. When you see people spreading misinformation—even unintentionally—politely say something in a reblog or reply. If it’s your friend, send them a message to let them know.

One last note: Please vote.

Survey Results: Fan Platform Use over Time

Particularly for those who were kind enough to participate in our survey last week, or to share it even after we halted data collection (because we received so many responses so quickly!), I wanted to give you something interesting right away. As you know, the academic writing and publishing process can be lengthy, so who knows when you might get a full paper from us! But in the meantime, this was the analysis I did this weekend.

The survey asked for participants to indicate what platforms they use/used from a given list, and also to indicate a date range (e.g., Tumblr 2006-2018). I parsed those date ranges in order to determine for a given platform how many of our participants were active in a given year. (This actually gave me an excuse to write some code for the first time in years. Jupyter Notebooks are super cool.)

(Click on the image above for full resolution!)

The Y axis is number of survey participants who indicated using the platform during a given time, and the X axis is year. (This starts at 1990, though I’ll note there were 10-ish participants who indicated using usenet, email lists, and/or messageboards in the 1980s.)

Some interesting things to note: (1) See how fanfiction.net has a spike where there was a big drop off but then it stabilized? That’s around the time that they cracked down on adult content. (2) I expected to see Livejournal decline drastically sooner, but it actually continued to climb a bit after Strikethrough and related things, until Tumblr and AO3 both started getting very popular. Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively so far, I do think that people were starting to leave, but that there had to be critical mass elsewhere in order for that leaving to start going en masse. There were also a lot of people who continued using Livejournal while they picked up other platforms as well. (3) As my PhD student collaborator Brianna said, we have “a beautiful arc of AO3 and Tumblr being besties forever.” (This makes sense to me based on some findings from my previous work about AO3, and how Tumblr filled in the gap of social interaction left by Livejournal.)

In the “other” category of fan platforms used, the most popular was Discord. This doesn’t surprise me! For the most part, participants had only been active in it for the past couple of years, which is why it didn’t show up specifically in the survey (which was constructed based on interview data we already had). We also saw less frequent mentions of Facebook, reddit, delicious/pinboard, and IRC.

Digging into the qualitative data will give this data much more explanatory power, but I think this is very interesting! We also asked participants what their primary fandom was for each platform they used. Based on a pretty simple analysis (most popular words!), here are the top five fandoms from each platform: Usenet: Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Star Wars, Sailor Moon

Email Lists: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Gundam Wing

Messageboards: Harry Potter, Buffy, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon

Fandom-Specific Archives: Harry Potter, Buffy, Stargate, X-Files, Doctor Who

Fanfiction.net:  Harry Potter, Naruto, Buffy, Star Wars, Gundam Wing

Livejournal: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Stargate, Doctor Who, Merlin

DeviantArt: Harry Potter, Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Supernatural, Final Fantasy

Dreamwidth: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Marvel, Stargate, RPF

Archive of Our Own: Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Supernatural, Teen Wolf

Tumblr: Marvel, Star Wars, Supernatural, Harry Potter, Teen Wolf

Twitter: Star Wars, Supernatural, Marvel, RPF, Yuri on Ice

Note that this is NOT necessarily representative of the overall popularity of certain fandoms on these platforms. Our survey, because it was targeting research questions about fandom migration, asked for participants who had been in fandom for 10+ years. This means that our results skewed older (mean 31; median 30; SD 8.6). And of course, most of the participants are currently in fandom, which means that it also misses people who have left fandom.

It is interesting to see the change across platforms and over time though! My favorite tidbit is how Star Wars was popular, dropped off, and then came back with gusto.

This is only the tip of the iceberg on this data analysis! If there’s anything else that is easily shared as we do this analysis, I’ll continue to do so. Otherwise, wish us luck and I’ll eventually share a completed analysis if/when (fingers crossed!) we publish on this.