Digital Commons Network^™

Fanbinding, Preservation, And Local Archives: Un-Digitizing Trends And Media Ownership In Fandom Information Practices, Kimberly Kennedy

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Fanbinding, or the practice of printing fanworks into books, creates a physical format of primarily digital content. My previous research found that a common motivation for fanbinders to participate in this craft was preservation of their personal access to beloved fanworks, which echoes broader trends of controlling media through local physical archives. This implies an understanding of the ephemeral nature of digital content and a subsequent fear of losing access to their favorite content without their intervention. Fanbinding creates a physical copy of a fanwork that cannot disappear due to platform/author takedowns or server failures, thereby establishing the fanbinders’ ownership …

From Fan Blogs To Fruits Basket: Documenting The Resources Of Anime And Manga Studies Libguides, Billy Tringali, Vibu Logendran

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Anime and manga have seen exponential growth in market value, and popularity, over the last decade. This boom of popularity for anime has been matched in recent years by an increased interest from fans in anime and manga studies. This project seeks to document the contents of anime studies research guides, with the goal of seeing what specific resources, popular media, and fan media like blogs, are listed within these guides and recommended to fans seeking to explore this budding area of scholarship.

Utilizing Metadata From Heterogeneous Sources Within The Framework Of The Jvmg And Golem Projects To Identify Patterns In Anime-Based Fandoms On Ao3, Zoltan Kacsuk, Xiaoyan Yang, Saskia Dreßler, Federico Pianzola, Martin Roth

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper offers an overview of the first step in the data alignment and joint research efforts between the Japanese Visual Media Graph (JVMG) and the Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models (GOLEM) projects. Focusing on fully or in-part anime based fandoms in the Archive of Our Own (AO3) data in the GOLEM knowledge graph we connected 534 fandoms with 1,734 anime works from the JVMG knowledge graph. The fanfiction publication numbers and dates for these fandoms were then analyzed in conjunction with the various metadata available on the corresponding anime works, such as release date, genre, content rating …

Fanfiction: When Copyright Violation Benefits Brands, Ethan Milne, Kirk Kristofferson, Miranda Goode

Proceedings from the Document Academy

We investigate fanfiction (i.e., original fiction adopting elements of pre-existing media), as a copyright-violating phenomenon and show it can benefit brands. Our work first identifies two benefits of fanfiction: 1) reading fanfiction increases purchase intent for brand content, 2) and fanfiction production rates can be used to generate more accurate estimates of next-week TV viewership. Next, we identify that brands can grow their fanfiction communities by waiving copyright protection, thus removing a barrier to publication faced by many fanfiction authors. We demonstrate these results using two real-world datasets representing billions of words of fanfiction content, and one lab study (N=600).

Fanfic! In The Library: What Can Be Learnt From How Readers Search For Fics?, Rowan Smith

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This research seeks to explore the use of fanfiction-specific language (FSL) within the fanfiction community and whether fanfiction readers would find it useful if FSL was incorporated into library catalogues. The aims of the research are to investigate how fanfiction readers learn, use and interact with FSL and to explore if incorporating FSL into public library catalogues would encourage use. A mixed-methods approach was taken – participants were surveyed using a questionnaire and follow-up interviews, which were analysed using descriptive statistics and coding following the constant comparative analysis process. The major findings of the study are that fanfiction readers largely …

Archiving The Ephemeral In Digital Public Space: Using Speculative Design To Consider Collaborative Fan Play In The Metaverse, Naomi Jacobs

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Looking at fan activity through the lens of play, this paper considers the archiving opportunities and challenges posed by new technology for playful ephemeral fan co-creation in multiplatform digital contexts. These include technical concerns such as platform fragility and how to capture inherent liveness and temporality, but also ethical concerns such as sustainability, consent and content moderation.

To examine this, the paper takes fan-created alternate reality games (ARGs) as a particular example of such archiving challenges. It first describes a real example of such a game, ‘Blow the Man Down’ before introducing speculative design as a method to consider a …

Do Androids Dream Of Bad Tv?: Un/Originality In Neil Burger’S Voyagers, Tom Ue, Callum M. Mcnutt

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Critics did not take kindly to Neil Burger’s Voyager (2021). On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored a dismal 25%, and the consensus is that it’s a trip best not taken: “It has a game cast and a premise ripe with potential, but Voyagers drifts in familiar orbit rather than fully exploring its intriguing themes.” This article seeks neither to reclaim the film as an unjustly neglected cinematic masterpiece nor to assert its importance in the canon of dystopian works. Rather, it treats Voyagers as a test case for exploring our own critical investment in the genre. Our aims are …

Building Bridges Ii: Papers From The Fanlis 2024 Symposium, Ludi Price, Lyn Robinson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

No abstract provided.

Don Brown And Japanese Librarianship During The Occupation Period, Taro Miura

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Japanese library policy during the post-war occupation was primarily driven by the Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) of the GHQ/SCAP. Donald B. Brown was a head of the Information Division of CIE, in charge of occupational media policy. He had experience as a journalist of The Japan Advertiser in 1930s and as an analyst in the Office of War Information (OWI) in early 1940s. He led the dissemination of democratic ideas in the media sector, publicizing the purpose of occupation to the general public, and eliminating militarism/non-democratic ideas. Branch Library Bulletin was published 45 times from 1948–1949 and conveyed …

Document Productivity Cycle (Study Case Of Samudera Raksa Ship Museum), Ciwuk Musiana Yudhawasthi, Lydia Christiani

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The study aims to discuss document productivity in the case of the Samudera Raksa Ship Museum. To answer this, the researchers made a productivity document study based on (1) Blasius Sudarsono's axiom, which states that "In the beginning, it was the human will to express what he thought and/or felt;" (2) Sudarsono's thoughts regarding documents as processes and products; (3) Lund’s concept of document creation; (4) Sabine Roux's thoughts on the rhizome concept in the document productivity process; and (5) the concept of museum communication by Yudhawasthi. Based on these theoretical frameworks, an analysis of the document productivity in the …

The New Paradigm Of Textual Content In Organizations: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis In The Digital Landscape, Sandrine Lefebvre-Reghay

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In this article, we aim to expand digital literature analysis to evaluate organizational textual content, vital for contemporary organizations' communication and operation. By comparing traditional literary structures with this new content format, we identify various dimensions influenced by it, including marketing, technology, economy, media, society, and culture. The dynamic nature of the internet, search engine algorithms, and AI's impact on content prompts a shift from prioritizing quantity to emphasizing quality, echoing Lucien Karpik's 1989 perspective on the value economy.

Documentation As Meta-Level Activity, Sascha Donner

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Today we live in an information society, which is to a large extent also a document society (Buckland, 2018). In our daily lives, we must cope with an ever-growing flood of different documents, keep track of them, pick out relevant content, and produce documents in suitable forms. In addition, tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as ChatGPT[1], are making their way into the document world, challenging us with new affordances, and questions about how to deal with them and what changes this will bring.

Existing documentation models such as the model of complementarity (N. W. Lund, …

What Is A Lesbian Document? Platforming Archival Description, Documents, And History In Sweden, Rachel Pierce

Proceedings from the Document Academy

As Joanna Drucker (2014) convincingly argues, “Most information visualizations are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation" (p. 10). This article investigates the visuality and built-in argumentations of the Alvin interface for digitized Swedish cultural heritage, focusing on how the platform defines a document and the effects this definition has on the accessibility and interconnectedness of documents related to lesbian and feminist histories. This paper addresses how (failed) systematization and an emphasis on large quantities of documents and metadata breathes new life into outdated historiographies and renders documents and information related to feminist and lesbian histories and connections between these histories …

Revisiting Robert Pagès: Documents And Culture, Michael K. Buckland

Proceedings from the Document Academy

An introduction to the life and work of Robert Pagès (1919–2007), French social psychology researcher and theorist of documentation. From 1946 to 1948 Pagès was a student in the program in documentation directed by Suzanne Briet that later became the Institut National des Techniques de Documentation (INTD). A 1947 thesis was published in 1948 as an article entitled “Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel” (Documentary transformations and cultural context). It received little attention until recently. The article, now reprinted and translated, examines the rise of new media and how they have largely displaced lived experience and bookish knowledge in a society …

Recursive Documentary Design And An Awareness Of The Mechanism, Wayne Defremery

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This essay documents 3D-printed sculptures displayed at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Document Academy. To raise awareness about the cultural significance of the mechanisms that produce digital substance, the sculptures lend material heft to some of the abstractions that help to constitute textual representations of a sixteenth-century Korean lyric and modern Korean poems from the early twentieth century in digital environments. The essay also describes previous exhibitions of the sculptures that utilized augmented reality technologies. By documenting the ways augmented reality technologies represented 3D-printed sculpture that documents digital texts that represent printed documents and manuscripts, the essay suggests how …

Designing A Multimedia Documentary Device For Research-Intervention Through Co-Design: The Case Of The Innovation Labs Observatory, Cécile Payeur

Proceedings from the Document Academy

We propose to explore the modalities and problematics of the co-design of a multimedia device documentary. The project “Innovation Labs Observatory,” led by the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) and the collective Codesign-it!, explores a new way of doing intervention-research by designing a website for the diffusion of multimedia documents and for the documentation during the project. In addition to giving access to different types of co-designed documents (texts, podcasts, videos, pictures…), this website can also be considered as a new form of material for the research in progress. Here, we present the way we used to proceed …

Document Theory And Document Design, Arthur Perret

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper reports on an experiment which connects document design with document theory. Document design is about what documents should do. We use the example of document graphs and of Cosma, a visualization program created during the HyperOtlet research programme, to show how theory can inform design decisions and help conceptualize results.

Exploring Artifacts And Documents In Collective Creativity Workshops Applied To Future Studies, Mathilde Sarré-Charrier

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In a context of uncertainty, organizations use creativity methods to anticipate future challenges in relations with the long-term evolutions of the society. These approaches consist in bringing together people with complementary points of view to multiply the diversity of ideas. This paper focuses on the process of transformation and selection of ideas and artifacts from a collective perspective in the unprecedented circumstances that occurred during the pandemic.

We question how ideas are grounded in the documents and artifacts produced at the key moments of the creative process from the perspective of the facilitators and the participants.

In this paper we …

Ecological Functions Of The Document In Art And Design: Diplomatic Documents In Artistic Inquiries, Yann Aucompte

Proceedings from the Document Academy

A certain ecologist art form has been on the rise for the past twenty years. Those artworks include documents. The analysis will take two examples : Tale as Tool, and Chroniques de l’accueil. The use of documents doesn't deal with representation, as it used to be in art, but with inquiries. The ecological art tries to trigger testimonies and transformations of the common representation of nature. They don’t use documents as a trace but for their diplomatic capabilities. The document doesn’t record events or facts but it changes the situation. The ecological artists come with this paradoxical art stance : …

Making-To-Be: Documents, Facta, And Material-Discursive Agency, Elliott Hauser

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper presents the performative analysis of agency within and surrounding documents as a path towards uniting the otherwise incompatible insights of both meaningcentric and materialcentric approaches. I contrast the terms agentical, providing agency, and agentic, possessing agency, to help clarify the apparent incompatibilities of prior approaches. I argue that a relational conception of agency, wherein the agentical/agentic distinction is blurred, preserves important virtues of both meaning and materialcentric approaches to documents. This paves the way for a unified materialdiscursive account of documents and a cure for document studies’ inherited duality malady. Extending prior work on capta (Drucker, 2011) and …

Powerful Particulars As “Autodocuments” In Documentality, Ronald E. Day

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The purpose of this short paper is to sketch the problem of whether documentality, in the sense of the appearance of evidence, must always take the form of a type-token relationship. In contrast to a type-token epistemology common in the Library and Information Science tradition, the paper argues that there is precedence for a theory of documentality that views evidentiality as a product of the powers of particulars to make themselves present. To make this argument, it appeals to Robert Pagès theory of documents and, over a half century later, Bernd Frohmann’s proposal for a philosophy of information, “Documentality.” Such …

Experimental Document Analysis—An Analytical Framework For Document Design, Niels W. Lund

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In this paper I will present an analytical framework for future documents, an experimental document analysis providing support for document design. The American economist, Herbert A. Simon outlined how to design an artificial object in his work "The Sciences of the Artificial" (1969, 1996) and described how this can be done in a systematic way, by a science of design. Simon describes the design process as a matter of finding possible alternatives among the potential optimal alternatives and finding a satisficing solution, by which he means a solution in-between satisfactory solutions and optimal solutions which can work in real life, …

The Library Wants To Kill You: Places Of Information As Battleground And Sanctum In Halo, Mackenzie Streissguth

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Video games are often a widespread access point for studying information-seeking behaviors, as a large portion of the population (and its youth) play them. Understanding how real-world analogues, like libraries, are portrayed in games can give us insights into how they mirror conflicts of reality. By examining the depictions of information systems and accompanying curators in Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), we can begin to investigate the perceptions of libraries and their antagonism in ludonarratives. Resulting analysis reveals multiple layers of archival hostility that are ultimately upended in later iterations in the game series, changing the nature of the library itself. …

Data Lost, Forbidden Or Controlled?: The Archivists Of Horizon Forbidden West, Ashley Lanni

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper discusses the archival and information usage practices of characters within the 2022 video game Horizon Forbidden West. It considers how science fiction settings, particularly those based in post-apocalyptic futures with different technology and information practices, can help us reflect on how contemporary society interacts with information and determines its use. Furthermore, the paper explores the social responsibility informational professionals have toward the world around them through contrasting various groups and characters within the game, positing that the main group's actions are the most morally lauded within the game's narrative.

"I’M Mixing Comic Book Canon And Mcu Canon To Suit My Own Needs": Information Sharing As Community Building In A Fandom In Flux, Alison Harding

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Utilizing the rapidly changing landscape of the Marvel fandom on fanfiction archive Archive of Our Own (AO3) as a research site, this paper presents the findings of a combined autoethnography and digital ethnography of the Falcon and the Winter Soldier community. The work explores the ways in which a fandom community builds itself through information sharing. While the study garnered many findings, this paper primarily focuses on how tags are vital to crafting community identity, while also creating barriers to entry within the Falcon and the Winter Soldier fandom.

The results show that while the broader Marvel fandom can be …

This Sounds Like An Episode Of The X-Files: Analyzing How Twitter Users Interpreted The Covid-19 Pandemic Through The Lens Of Sci-Fi Television, Nicole Neece

Proceedings from the Document Academy

While science fiction has a long-standing habit of predicting future technologies, The X-Files’ focus on anatomical manipulations as a means of control resulted in a plotline that inadvertently mirrored the COVID-19 pandemic which occurred a few years later. The proximity to such a similar, real-world situation resulted in some audiences interpreting their own experiences through the framework of sci-fi television, demonstrating that the discursive environment crafted through the text of The X-Files is continually applicable to contemporary anxieties and paranoia even after the show finished airing. In this article, I argue that The X-Files’ critiques of real-world abuses of …

The Citational Practices Of Science Fiction Fan Podcasts, Amber Sewell

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Podcasts are important sites of knowledge sharing and co-creation. As opportunities to discuss niche interests, podcasts are where individuals come together to discuss the things they love, and for fans, podcasts are often opportunities to critically engage with their franchise or work with others in the fandom. The conversational nature of podcasting means each party can bring forth new ideas and perspectives that shape how we engage with the work and fandom that’s grown around it. This paper shares the results of an exploratory study of the citational practices of science fiction fan podcasts. Initially intending to analyze transcripts of …

Infinite Archives, Infinite Possibilities: Learning Research And Databases With Archive Of Our Own, B. Austin Waters, Alayna Vander Veer

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This article will discuss the importance of acknowledging the information practices of subcultural groups within library instruction and fostering an inclusive learning environment with the implementation of a workshop by comparing research databases with the popular fanfiction website, Archive of Our Own. By incorporating AO3 into library instruction, students’ interests and prior experiences were engaged by utilizing the principles of subcultural capital. The workshop utilized students’ knowledge of information searching from their personal lives and their interests to highlight similarities with academic research using examples such as filters, keywords, and author searching. This allowed students to develop skills to search …

Fandom, Fanzines, And Archiving Science Fiction Fannish History, Karen Hellekson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This brief history of science fiction (sf) fandom and fanzines focuses on the creation of a zine culture crucial to the split between written sf and media fandom; it also addresses archival holdings of sf and media zines dating from the 1930s on.

Halliday Journals And Holodecks: Audiences And Information In Sci-Fi Fandoms: Papers From The Fanlis 2023 Symposium, Ludi Price, Lyn Robinson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

No abstract provided.