For science!

I have more or less concluded my fieldwork, but this week I am doing a bit of additional research by investigating some themes that I will be addressing in my thesis. As part of this, I will attempt to arrange a few group chats, each one dedicated to one specific topic. On Wednesday I’d like to talk about Sally. Whether you love, loathe, are indifferent or anything in between, I’d love to hear your thoughts and theories.

When: Wednesday October 22, 7pm GMT

Where: Chatzy chatroom

Topic: Sally Donovan

Please note that due to daylight saving time, you might be an hour extra ahead or behind GMT; please refer to this site.

If you would like to participate in any (or all!) of these chats, I’d be grateful if you would let me know – but it’s also perfectly possible to just show up in the chatroom at the right date and time. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU SHOULD CHOOSE A RANDOM NICK THAT YOU DO NOT USE ANYWHERE ELSE. This is to protect your integrity. However, please let me know in an ask or e-mail ([email protected]) which nick you have selected – I need to know who you are for my analysis.

I will have prepared a few questions, but don’t hesitate to pose your own or to bring up anything related to the topic that is relevant to you. If you feel shy about doing so yourself, send me an ask or e-mail and I’ll ask your questions for you. If we stray too far away from Sherlock-related matters, I’ll steer us back, but it’s really quite informal – I’ll join in with the discussion too, offering my own opinions. Regarding politeness: I expect everyone who participates to behave in a mature and respectful manner. It is perfectly all right to disagree, but if we want to have a good, proper discussion we need to be willing to not only state our own viewpoint but actually listen to what the other has to say. Don’t be shy about expressing your opinions – just don’t be rude about it.

I do not have a set time table for this – we’ll talk for as long as we have things to talk about. If you have to leave, you have to leave; no hard feelings. It is unlikely we’ll be at it for more than two hours, however.

The other two group chats are:

—-

When: Thursday October 23, 7pm GMT

Where: Chatzy chatroom

Topic: Johnlock in series three

—-

When: Sunday October 26, 7pm GMT

Where: Chatzy chatroom

Topic: The Fall – did we learn the truth in TEH? Special focus on the roles of Mycroft and Moriarty.

A Story of Significance. The Creation of Meaning in the Sherlock Fan Community.

  Background

Healthy human beings are in constant and relentless pursuit of meaning. Not only do we want to know what is happening; we want to know why it is happening and what it means. Meaning can seemingly be found in the most random of things – in the alignment of distant stars when we leave our mothers’ wombs, in the wearing of the colours sported by an eleven man gang of grown men kicking a ball, in the stories we tell ourselves before we drift off to sleep.

It can also, as I will suggest in my thesis, be found in the interpretations of a popular TV show as articulated by the interactions and creations of fans online. A large part of the blogs on the social media platform Tumblr is dedicated to such activities, and one of the most lively fandom communities there today is the one dedicated to the BBC TV series Sherlock, a modern adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective stories. Several thousands of Sherlock fans, primarily women between 15-30[1], discuss theories, express opinions, post pictures and gif sets as well as fan fiction and fan art. Many of them do spend many hours every day doing so, these activities and the discourse on the source material (the actual TV series) it shapes are seemingly deeply meaningful to them.

This, then, is the focus of my study. On the one hand, I wish to study this particular community (both on- and offline) since as a culture it is of interest on its own, but on the other I hope to – as many anthropologists are wont to do – be able to draw some general conclusions from a very particular case and so through my studies shed more light on the stories of significance and the nature of the human creation of meaning.

  Overall Research Question

How is text-related meaning created, negotiated, sustained and shared in the Sherlock fandom, both on- and offline?

  Operationalising Sub-Questions

In what – if any – sense can the interpretations/stories told and shared by fans be said to be meaningful?

What are the contents of the potentially meaningful interpretations/stories told and shared by the fans?

How is this content created, shared and negotiated (on- and offline)?

How does an individual’s meaningful interpretations relate to various discourses in and outside of the community?

What ‘crises of meaning’ can be identified in the fan’s interactions/discourse?

How are these crisis points dealt with?

  The Field and Methodology                    

Time was when the only people you would interact with were the ones you could actually see or hear[2]. This was, admittedly, a very long time ago, but even after the invention of techniques and devices that enabled communication with those outside of one’s immediate physical surroundings – e.g. writing, radio, the telephone – the immediately reciprocal social and cultural interactions (in contrast to the one-way communication of mass media, for instance) were still largely based on a shared physical space. This is no longer true; today many of our social and cultural interactions take place online, and a great many communities exists primarily, or even only, in digital form. Once dubbed as sub-cultures, these online communities are now arguably one of the most important platforms for social interaction and are as such of great interest to anthropologists. Yet, most of the scholarly interest that has been paid to these communities have not been anthropological – the field of digital anthropology occupies itself more (though certainly not exclusively) with human-technology interactions than with the social ones enabled by said technology. It seems to me a strange and sad lack, though I am confident that it is one that will be dealt with in due time.

Not only are online communities and cultures of interest for anthropologists in and of themselves; they also provide an excellent field for certain kind of thematic studies of cultural creation and sharing (as well as discourse analysis) because the interaction and content is all there on the computer screen – in the gifsets and text posts and drawings – to be seen and followed and traced[3]. However, it also presents unique difficulties, as there is no obvious way to conduct participant observation in such a milieu.

As with physical spaces, the popularity and demographic of digital spaces vary. Ten to five years ago, most ‘fangirls’ would discuss and celebrate their favourite movies, books and TV-shows on the blog platform LiveJournal, but these days the majority of such activities takes place on the microblogging platform and social networking site Tumblr. With 184 million blogs as per May 1:st 2014, Tumblr is structured similarly to Twitter, but allows the posting of longer text posts and multimedia. Content can be tagged, as on Twitter, and by ‘going into the tag’ one can see all posts marked with, for instance, ‘Sherlock BBC’. You can follow other blogs, and the content posted on them will appear on your dashboard.

In a sense, this is a field I entered almost two years ago when I created my very own Tumblr blog – mainly to be a part of the Sherlock community and access the fan creations offered by it. However, participation only makes up one half of the method ‘participant observation’, and so I won’t enter the field properly until I do so with a clear research goal and strategy in mind. Ideally, I will do so in July and spend two months gathering data by tracking relevant tags, observing and participating in discussion, and interviewing fans. The last point is particularly important as the content posted on Tumblr is often fragmented (i.e. a gif set) and the significance (if any) it holds to the creator or others is not available without a more in-depth discussion of it.

But even though a large part of the interactions between fans takes place online, not all does, and so I am meeting fans offline as well, for interviews, group discussions and watch-alongs.

  Theoretical Approaches: Fan studies is a fairly young field, but has already produced rather extensive theoretical works, of which I will particularly utilize Henry Jenkin’s works. Favouring a broad cross-disciplinary approach[4], I will combine theories from sociology, psychology, evolutionary neurobiology, philosophy and – of course – anthropology. My starting point for the analysis is Kenneth Pargament’s theory of coping, potentially mixed up with a bit of Gregory Bateson’s thoughts on evolutionary change (if I can make that work), and for my method I will rely largely but not exclusively on discourse and narrative analysis.

  Update: What I Have Done So Far

As of September 1:st I have been conducting field work for little over a month – although, in all fairness, quite some time has been spent trying to figure out just how to conduct participant observation on a platform such as Tumblr. Online I have been following, the discussions and fan works production there, tracking relevant and popular tags such as ‘johnlock’, ‘tjlc’ and ‘mary morstan’. I am currently looking for new informants to interview, individually and in groups (via e-mails and chats), and for people to join online watch-alongs.

Offline I have staged several viewing sessions, where I and between three and four others have watched the series together. I have both participated and observed the comments made and the discussions sparked during the viewings, which have been followed by group interviews. I am also meeting several people (some of whom have been part of the viewings) for individual in-depth interviews (one of these individuals is a professional magician, and I’ll be going to Stockholm to watch his show, which is in part inspired by the series).

In the next few weeks, I will continue to host viewings, interview people both on- and offline and hopefully find a way to participate (rather than just observe) the discussions and fan interactions on Tumblr. I will be attending a fan studies conference in Prague to present a short paper based on my fieldwork in November; this paper is due September 26:th.

I have also done a fair bit of reading, mostly the theoretical works of various fan studies scholars, but also some anthropological method.

  Litterature (exceedingly tentative list):

Broker, Will. Using the Force.

Coleman, Gabriella. Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media.

Gray, Sandvoss, Harrington. Fandom.

Hill, Matt. Fan Cultures.

Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

Jenkins, H. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture

Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Intersect.

Pargament, Kenneth. The Psychology of Religion and Coping.

Pearce, Celia. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

Wilson, Samuel M & Leighton C. Peterson. The Anthropology of Online Communities.

Staigert, Janet. Media Reception Studies.

Strage, Fredrik. Fans.

[1] These statistics need checking as they are currently based only on my own experience, but I believe them to be fairly accurate.

[2] This is, perhaps, a claim that needs to be modified and elaborated on, but in this very short thesis project description it will have to do.

[3] Of course there are some complications and problems with this, but I’ll save that for the actual thesis – this is already getting long.

A Story of Significance. The Creation of Meaning in the Sherlock Fan Community.

  Background

Healthy human beings are in constant and relentless pursuit of meaning. Not only do we want to know what is happening; we want to know why it is happening and what it means. Meaning can seemingly be found in the most random of things – in the alignment of distant stars when we leave our mothers’ wombs, in the wearing of the colours sported by an eleven man gang of grown men kicking a ball, in the stories we tell ourselves before we drift off to sleep.

It can also, as I will suggest in my thesis, be found in the interpretations of a popular TV show as articulated by the interactions and creations of fans online. A large part of the blogs on the social media platform Tumblr is dedicated to such activities, and one of the most lively fandom communities there today is the one dedicated to the BBC TV series Sherlock, a modern adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective stories. Several thousands of Sherlock fans, primarily women between 15-30[1], discuss theories, express opinions, post pictures and gif sets as well as fan fiction and fan art. Many of them do spend many hours every day doing so, these activities and the discourse on the source material (the actual TV series) it shapes are seemingly deeply meaningful to them.

This, then, is the focus of my study. On the one hand, I wish to study this particular community (both on- and offline) since as a culture it is of interest on its own, but on the other I hope to – as many anthropologists are wont to do – be able to draw some general conclusions from a very particular case and so through my studies shed more light on the stories of significance and the nature of the human creation of meaning.

  Overall Research Question

How is text-related meaning created, negotiated, sustained and shared in the Sherlock fandom, both on- and offline?

  Operationalising Sub-Questions

In what – if any – sense can the interpretations/stories told and shared by fans be said to be meaningful?

What are the contents of the potentially meaningful interpretations/stories told and shared by the fans?

How is this content created, shared and negotiated (on- and offline)?

How does an individual’s meaningful interpretations relate to various discourses in and outside of the community?

What ‘crises of meaning’ can be identified in the fan’s interactions/discourse?

How are these crisis points dealt with?

  The Field and Methodology                    

Time was when the only people you would interact with were the ones you could actually see or hear[2]. This was, admittedly, a very long time ago, but even after the invention of techniques and devices that enabled communication with those outside of one’s immediate physical surroundings – e.g. writing, radio, the telephone – the immediately reciprocal social and cultural interactions (in contrast to the one-way communication of mass media, for instance) were still largely based on a shared physical space. This is no longer true; today many of our social and cultural interactions take place online, and a great many communities exists primarily, or even only, in digital form. Once dubbed as sub-cultures, these online communities are now arguably one of the most important platforms for social interaction and are as such of great interest to anthropologists. Yet, most of the scholarly interest that has been paid to these communities have not been anthropological – the field of digital anthropology occupies itself more (though certainly not exclusively) with human-technology interactions than with the social ones enabled by said technology. It seems to me a strange and sad lack, though I am confident that it is one that will be dealt with in due time.

Not only are online communities and cultures of interest for anthropologists in and of themselves; they also provide an excellent field for certain kind of thematic studies of cultural creation and sharing (as well as discourse analysis) because the interaction and content is all there on the computer screen – in the gifsets and text posts and drawings – to be seen and followed and traced[3]. However, it also presents unique difficulties, as there is no obvious way to conduct participant observation in such a milieu.

As with physical spaces, the popularity and demographic of digital spaces vary. Ten to five years ago, most ‘fangirls’ would discuss and celebrate their favourite movies, books and TV-shows on the blog platform LiveJournal, but these days the majority of such activities takes place on the microblogging platform and social networking site Tumblr. With 184 million blogs as per May 1:st 2014, Tumblr is structured similarly to Twitter, but allows the posting of longer text posts and multimedia. Content can be tagged, as on Twitter, and by ‘going into the tag’ one can see all posts marked with, for instance, ‘Sherlock BBC’. You can follow other blogs, and the content posted on them will appear on your dashboard.

In a sense, this is a field I entered almost two years ago when I created my very own Tumblr blog – mainly to be a part of the Sherlock community and access the fan creations offered by it. However, participation only makes up one half of the method ‘participant observation’, and so I won’t enter the field properly until I do so with a clear research goal and strategy in mind. Ideally, I will do so in July and spend two months gathering data by tracking relevant tags, observing and participating in discussion, and interviewing fans. The last point is particularly important as the content posted on Tumblr is often fragmented (i.e. a gif set) and the significance (if any) it holds to the creator or others is not available without a more in-depth discussion of it.

But even though a large part of the interactions between fans takes place online, not all does, and so I am meeting fans offline as well, for interviews, group discussions and watch-alongs.

  Theoretical Approaches: Fan studies is a fairly young field, but has already produced rather extensive theoretical works, of which I will particularly utilize Henry Jenkin’s works. Favouring a broad cross-disciplinary approach[4], I will combine theories from sociology, psychology, evolutionary neurobiology, philosophy and – of course – anthropology. My starting point for the analysis is Kenneth Pargament’s theory of coping, potentially mixed up with a bit of Gregory Bateson’s thoughts on evolutionary change (if I can make that work), and for my method I will rely largely but not exclusively on discourse and narrative analysis.

  Update: What I Have Done So Far

As of September 1:st I have been conducting field work for little over a month – although, in all fairness, quite some time has been spent trying to figure out just how to conduct participant observation on a platform such as Tumblr. Online I have been following, the discussions and fan works production there, tracking relevant and popular tags such as ‘johnlock’, ‘tjlc’ and ‘mary morstan’. I am currently looking for new informants to interview, individually and in groups (via e-mails and chats), and for people to join online watch-alongs.

Offline I have staged several viewing sessions, where I and between three and four others have watched the series together. I have both participated and observed the comments made and the discussions sparked during the viewings, which have been followed by group interviews. I am also meeting several people (some of whom have been part of the viewings) for individual in-depth interviews (one of these individuals is a professional magician, and I’ll be going to Stockholm to watch his show, which is in part inspired by the series).

In the next few weeks, I will continue to host viewings, interview people both on- and offline and hopefully find a way to participate (rather than just observe) the discussions and fan interactions on Tumblr. I will be attending a fan studies conference in Prague to present a short paper based on my fieldwork in November; this paper is due September 26:th.

I have also done a fair bit of reading, mostly the theoretical works of various fan studies scholars, but also some anthropological method.

  Litterature (exceedingly tentative list):

Broker, Will. Using the Force.

Coleman, Gabriella. Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media.

Gray, Sandvoss, Harrington. Fandom.

Hill, Matt. Fan Cultures.

Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

Jenkins, H. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture

Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Intersect.

Pargament, Kenneth. The Psychology of Religion and Coping.

Pearce, Celia. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

Wilson, Samuel M & Leighton C. Peterson. The Anthropology of Online Communities.

Staigert, Janet. Media Reception Studies.

Strage, Fredrik. Fans.

[1] These statistics need checking as they are currently based only on my own experience, but I believe them to be fairly accurate.

[2] This is, perhaps, a claim that needs to be modified and elaborated on, but in this very short thesis project description it will have to do.

[3] Of course there are some complications and problems with this, but I’ll save that for the actual thesis – this is already getting long.

A Story of Significance. The Creation of Meaning in the Sherlock Fan Community.

  Background

Healthy human beings are in constant and relentless pursuit of meaning. Not only do we want to know what is happening; we want to know why it is happening and what it means. Meaning can seemingly be found in the most random of things – in the alignment of distant stars when we leave our mothers’ wombs, in the wearing of the colours sported by an eleven man gang of grown men kicking a ball, in the stories we tell ourselves before we drift off to sleep.

It can also, as I will suggest in my thesis, be found in the interpretations of a popular TV show as articulated by the interactions and creations of fans online. A large part of the blogs on the social media platform Tumblr is dedicated to such activities, and one of the most lively fandom communities there today is the one dedicated to the BBC TV series Sherlock, a modern adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective stories. Several thousands of Sherlock fans, primarily women between 15-30[1], discuss theories, express opinions, post pictures and gif sets as well as fan fiction and fan art. Many of them do spend many hours every day doing so, these activities and the discourse on the source material (the actual TV series) it shapes are seemingly deeply meaningful to them.

This, then, is the focus of my study. On the one hand, I wish to study this particular community (both on- and offline) since as a culture it is of interest on its own, but on the other I hope to – as many anthropologists are wont to do – be able to draw some general conclusions from a very particular case and so through my studies shed more light on the stories of significance and the nature of the human creation of meaning.

  Overall Research Question

How is text-related meaning created, negotiated, sustained and shared in the Sherlock fandom, both on- and offline?

  Operationalising Sub-Questions

In what – if any – sense can the interpretations/stories told and shared by fans be said to be meaningful?

What are the contents of the potentially meaningful interpretations/stories told and shared by the fans?

How is this content created, shared and negotiated (on- and offline)?

How does an individual’s meaningful interpretations relate to various discourses in and outside of the community?

What ‘crises of meaning’ can be identified in the fan’s interactions/discourse?

How are these crisis points dealt with?

  The Field and Methodology                    

Time was when the only people you would interact with were the ones you could actually see or hear[2]. This was, admittedly, a very long time ago, but even after the invention of techniques and devices that enabled communication with those outside of one’s immediate physical surroundings – e.g. writing, radio, the telephone – the immediately reciprocal social and cultural interactions (in contrast to the one-way communication of mass media, for instance) were still largely based on a shared physical space. This is no longer true; today many of our social and cultural interactions take place online, and a great many communities exists primarily, or even only, in digital form. Once dubbed as sub-cultures, these online communities are now arguably one of the most important platforms for social interaction and are as such of great interest to anthropologists. Yet, most of the scholarly interest that has been paid to these communities have not been anthropological – the field of digital anthropology occupies itself more (though certainly not exclusively) with human-technology interactions than with the social ones enabled by said technology. It seems to me a strange and sad lack, though I am confident that it is one that will be dealt with in due time.

Not only are online communities and cultures of interest for anthropologists in and of themselves; they also provide an excellent field for certain kind of thematic studies of cultural creation and sharing (as well as discourse analysis) because the interaction and content is all there on the computer screen – in the gifsets and text posts and drawings – to be seen and followed and traced[3]. However, it also presents unique difficulties, as there is no obvious way to conduct participant observation in such a milieu.

As with physical spaces, the popularity and demographic of digital spaces vary. Ten to five years ago, most ‘fangirls’ would discuss and celebrate their favourite movies, books and TV-shows on the blog platform LiveJournal, but these days the majority of such activities takes place on the microblogging platform and social networking site Tumblr. With 184 million blogs as per May 1:st 2014, Tumblr is structured similarly to Twitter, but allows the posting of longer text posts and multimedia. Content can be tagged, as on Twitter, and by ‘going into the tag’ one can see all posts marked with, for instance, ‘Sherlock BBC’. You can follow other blogs, and the content posted on them will appear on your dashboard.

In a sense, this is a field I entered almost two years ago when I created my very own Tumblr blog – mainly to be a part of the Sherlock community and access the fan creations offered by it. However, participation only makes up one half of the method ‘participant observation’, and so I won’t enter the field properly until I do so with a clear research goal and strategy in mind. Ideally, I will do so in July and spend two months gathering data by tracking relevant tags, observing and participating in discussion, and interviewing fans. The last point is particularly important as the content posted on Tumblr is often fragmented (i.e. a gif set) and the significance (if any) it holds to the creator or others is not available without a more in-depth discussion of it.

But even though a large part of the interactions between fans takes place online, not all does, and so I am meeting fans offline as well, for interviews, group discussions and watch-alongs.

  Theoretical Approaches: Fan studies is a fairly young field, but has already produced rather extensive theoretical works, of which I will particularly utilize Henry Jenkin’s works. Favouring a broad cross-disciplinary approach[4], I will combine theories from sociology, psychology, evolutionary neurobiology, philosophy and – of course – anthropology. My starting point for the analysis is Kenneth Pargament’s theory of coping, potentially mixed up with a bit of Gregory Bateson’s thoughts on evolutionary change (if I can make that work), and for my method I will rely largely but not exclusively on discourse and narrative analysis.

  Update: What I Have Done So Far

As of September 1:st I have been conducting field work for little over a month – although, in all fairness, quite some time has been spent trying to figure out just how to conduct participant observation on a platform such as Tumblr. Online I have been following, the discussions and fan works production there, tracking relevant and popular tags such as ‘johnlock’, ‘tjlc’ and ‘mary morstan’. I am currently looking for new informants to interview, individually and in groups (via e-mails and chats), and for people to join online watch-alongs.

Offline I have staged several viewing sessions, where I and between three and four others have watched the series together. I have both participated and observed the comments made and the discussions sparked during the viewings, which have been followed by group interviews. I am also meeting several people (some of whom have been part of the viewings) for individual in-depth interviews (one of these individuals is a professional magician, and I’ll be going to Stockholm to watch his show, which is in part inspired by the series).

In the next few weeks, I will continue to host viewings, interview people both on- and offline and hopefully find a way to participate (rather than just observe) the discussions and fan interactions on Tumblr. I will be attending a fan studies conference in Prague to present a short paper based on my fieldwork in November; this paper is due September 26:th.

I have also done a fair bit of reading, mostly the theoretical works of various fan studies scholars, but also some anthropological method.

  Litterature (exceedingly tentative list):

Broker, Will. Using the Force.

Coleman, Gabriella. Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media.

Gray, Sandvoss, Harrington. Fandom.

Hill, Matt. Fan Cultures.

Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

Jenkins, H. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture

Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Intersect.

Pargament, Kenneth. The Psychology of Religion and Coping.

Pearce, Celia. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

Wilson, Samuel M & Leighton C. Peterson. The Anthropology of Online Communities.

Staigert, Janet. Media Reception Studies.

Strage, Fredrik. Fans.

[1] These statistics need checking as they are currently based only on my own experience, but I believe them to be fairly accurate.

[2] This is, perhaps, a claim that needs to be modified and elaborated on, but in this very short thesis project description it will have to do.

[3] Of course there are some complications and problems with this, but I’ll save that for the actual thesis – this is already getting long.

A Story of Significance. The Creation of Meaning in the Sherlock Fan Community.

  Background

Healthy human beings are in constant and relentless pursuit of meaning. Not only do we want to know what is happening; we want to know why it is happening and what it means. Meaning can seemingly be found in the most random of things – in the alignment of distant stars when we leave our mothers’ wombs, in the wearing of the colours sported by an eleven man gang of grown men kicking a ball, in the stories we tell ourselves before we drift off to sleep.

It can also, as I will suggest in my thesis, be found in the interpretations of a popular TV show as articulated by the interactions and creations of fans online. A large part of the blogs on the social media platform Tumblr is dedicated to such activities, and one of the most lively fandom communities there today is the one dedicated to the BBC TV series Sherlock, a modern adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective stories. Several thousands of Sherlock fans, primarily women between 15-30[1], discuss theories, express opinions, post pictures and gif sets as well as fan fiction and fan art. Many of them do spend many hours every day doing so, these activities and the discourse on the source material (the actual TV series) it shapes are seemingly deeply meaningful to them.

This, then, is the focus of my study. On the one hand, I wish to study this particular community (both on- and offline) since as a culture it is of interest on its own, but on the other I hope to – as many anthropologists are wont to do – be able to draw some general conclusions from a very particular case and so through my studies shed more light on the stories of significance and the nature of the human creation of meaning.

  Overall Research Question

How is text-related meaning created, negotiated, sustained and shared in the Sherlock fandom, both on- and offline?

  Operationalising Sub-Questions

In what – if any – sense can the interpretations/stories told and shared by fans be said to be meaningful?

What are the contents of the potentially meaningful interpretations/stories told and shared by the fans?

How is this content created, shared and negotiated (on- and offline)?

How does an individual’s meaningful interpretations relate to various discourses in and outside of the community?

What ‘crises of meaning’ can be identified in the fan’s interactions/discourse?

How are these crisis points dealt with?

  The Field and Methodology                    

Time was when the only people you would interact with were the ones you could actually see or hear[2]. This was, admittedly, a very long time ago, but even after the invention of techniques and devices that enabled communication with those outside of one’s immediate physical surroundings – e.g. writing, radio, the telephone – the immediately reciprocal social and cultural interactions (in contrast to the one-way communication of mass media, for instance) were still largely based on a shared physical space. This is no longer true; today many of our social and cultural interactions take place online, and a great many communities exists primarily, or even only, in digital form. Once dubbed as sub-cultures, these online communities are now arguably one of the most important platforms for social interaction and are as such of great interest to anthropologists. Yet, most of the scholarly interest that has been paid to these communities have not been anthropological – the field of digital anthropology occupies itself more (though certainly not exclusively) with human-technology interactions than with the social ones enabled by said technology. It seems to me a strange and sad lack, though I am confident that it is one that will be dealt with in due time.

Not only are online communities and cultures of interest for anthropologists in and of themselves; they also provide an excellent field for certain kind of thematic studies of cultural creation and sharing (as well as discourse analysis) because the interaction and content is all there on the computer screen – in the gifsets and text posts and drawings – to be seen and followed and traced[3]. However, it also presents unique difficulties, as there is no obvious way to conduct participant observation in such a milieu.

As with physical spaces, the popularity and demographic of digital spaces vary. Ten to five years ago, most ‘fangirls’ would discuss and celebrate their favourite movies, books and TV-shows on the blog platform LiveJournal, but these days the majority of such activities takes place on the microblogging platform and social networking site Tumblr. With 184 million blogs as per May 1:st 2014, Tumblr is structured similarly to Twitter, but allows the posting of longer text posts and multimedia. Content can be tagged, as on Twitter, and by ‘going into the tag’ one can see all posts marked with, for instance, ‘Sherlock BBC’. You can follow other blogs, and the content posted on them will appear on your dashboard.

In a sense, this is a field I entered almost two years ago when I created my very own Tumblr blog – mainly to be a part of the Sherlock community and access the fan creations offered by it. However, participation only makes up one half of the method ‘participant observation’, and so I won’t enter the field properly until I do so with a clear research goal and strategy in mind. Ideally, I will do so in July and spend two months gathering data by tracking relevant tags, observing and participating in discussion, and interviewing fans. The last point is particularly important as the content posted on Tumblr is often fragmented (i.e. a gif set) and the significance (if any) it holds to the creator or others is not available without a more in-depth discussion of it.

But even though a large part of the interactions between fans takes place online, not all does, and so I am meeting fans offline as well, for interviews, group discussions and watch-alongs.

  Theoretical Approaches: Fan studies is a fairly young field, but has already produced rather extensive theoretical works, of which I will particularly utilize Henry Jenkin’s works. Favouring a broad cross-disciplinary approach[4], I will combine theories from sociology, psychology, evolutionary neurobiology, philosophy and – of course – anthropology. My starting point for the analysis is Kenneth Pargament’s theory of coping, potentially mixed up with a bit of Gregory Bateson’s thoughts on evolutionary change (if I can make that work), and for my method I will rely largely but not exclusively on discourse and narrative analysis.

  Update: What I Have Done So Far

As of September 1:st I have been conducting field work for little over a month – although, in all fairness, quite some time has been spent trying to figure out just how to conduct participant observation on a platform such as Tumblr. Online I have been following, the discussions and fan works production there, tracking relevant and popular tags such as ‘johnlock’, ‘tjlc’ and ‘mary morstan’. I am currently looking for new informants to interview, individually and in groups (via e-mails and chats), and for people to join online watch-alongs.

Offline I have staged several viewing sessions, where I and between three and four others have watched the series together. I have both participated and observed the comments made and the discussions sparked during the viewings, which have been followed by group interviews. I am also meeting several people (some of whom have been part of the viewings) for individual in-depth interviews (one of these individuals is a professional magician, and I’ll be going to Stockholm to watch his show, which is in part inspired by the series).

In the next few weeks, I will continue to host viewings, interview people both on- and offline and hopefully find a way to participate (rather than just observe) the discussions and fan interactions on Tumblr. I will be attending a fan studies conference in Prague to present a short paper based on my fieldwork in November; this paper is due September 26:th.

I have also done a fair bit of reading, mostly the theoretical works of various fan studies scholars, but also some anthropological method.

  Litterature (exceedingly tentative list):

Broker, Will. Using the Force.

Coleman, Gabriella. Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media.

Gray, Sandvoss, Harrington. Fandom.

Hill, Matt. Fan Cultures.

Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

Jenkins, H. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture

Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where New and Old Media Intersect.

Pargament, Kenneth. The Psychology of Religion and Coping.

Pearce, Celia. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds

Wilson, Samuel M & Leighton C. Peterson. The Anthropology of Online Communities.

Staigert, Janet. Media Reception Studies.

Strage, Fredrik. Fans.

[1] These statistics need checking as they are currently based only on my own experience, but I believe them to be fairly accurate.

[2] This is, perhaps, a claim that needs to be modified and elaborated on, but in this very short thesis project description it will have to do.

[3] Of course there are some complications and problems with this, but I’ll save that for the actual thesis – this is already getting long.