A master's student at Georgetown is working on fan fiction for her thesis. There's a survey and she needs as many people from as many fandoms as possible to complete it so that the diversity of fan culture is represented.

(I copied the above directly from the website - no need to rephrase since she said it so well herself!)

I took the survey; it was a pleasant way to spend 15 minutes and it doesn't require your email address or anything like that.

Come on, go help the girl who's brave enough to choose fanfiction as her thesis topic. You know you want to!



Link to survey

I took the survey, it really doesn't take long.

Just out of curiousity, which stories did you name as your favourite three?

I think it was really hard, there are so many great stories in this fandom, but I finally decided on these:

Chris Mulder: Meet Me In Kansas City
I read it in 1999 or so, but I still remember how much I liked it and I was glued to the monitor for the whole night

Kathy Brown: Momentum: A Winter Holiday Tale
I loved it, it gave me the same warm, fuzzy feeling as a really good romantic comedy - and it actually lasts longer

Lynn M: The Butterfly Legacy
This didn't even feel like fanfic to me, it felt like a real novel. It was so different and emotionally powerful. I became so invested, I actually felt a little sad and wistful that Clark went back to his life in Metropolis.

Eva

Well, I started it, but I simply couldn't reduce my years of reading wonderful LNC fanfic down to just a few stories and definitely not just one single author, so I had to quit, unfortunately, before my brain exploded.

Shame, too, as it was quite enjoyable up till that point.

LabRat

Yeah that was such a toughie. I wanted to list at least 20 stories. I finally settled on three that covered different purposes, but I thought of so many other stories that also satisfy my need for B plot, A plot, or angst. You're all too good!

JD

I had trouble reducing it down to what 3 fandoms let alone what stories. Finally settled on L&C, Stargate, Kim Possible. For stories did 2 from each. Not totally the ones I like the absolute best, I can never narrow it down that much but ones that I do really like and that covered a range.

Home by Nan, The Dawn of Discovery By C. Leuch for L&C; Buried , and Reunion for Kim Possible; Nine Lives and Monkey Screaming for Stargate.

Luckily I'm currently only in 2 fandoms, which seems to be my limit. Listing my SG-1 favorites were easy (one author I check every day for a new post, and the other one I check every few months, since that seems to be her updating schedule). But L&C? Boy, that was a toughie. I went with ML Thompson's Super Stud, Crystal Wimmer's Full Circle, Barb Pillsbury's Smallville Players, and Wendy's Big Boys Do Fly. And there's more that I re-read occasionally.

If anyone's interested, the two I listed for SG-1 is Neuropsych's Campers series (and boy there's a lot there), and Dietcokechic's Barista series .

I'm willing to help, but, honestly, I'm somewhat disturbed that this is the subject of a Master's thesis from Georgetown.

Call me an elitist if you will, but really?

Funnily enough, I was exactly the same. My two fandoms were SG1 and LNC. SG1 I would have no problem at all whittling it down to just a few stories and one author (Sally Reeve, hands down).

LabRat

Studies on fandom are growing quite quickly as part of media studies and a lot of departments of gender and queer studies, etc.

Places such as metafandom (on lj, which takes fandom VERY seriously) and orgs like the new OTW are claiming its legitimacy.

It's actually pretty interesting.

alcyone

I couldn't list all I wanted it was so hard to choose particularly author I don't have a particular favourite. I like all!

Well... I, too, was a bit taken aback that this is supposed to be the thesis for a Master's, but if the University accepts then who am I to say anything?

Anyway I did fill in the various quizzes though I got stuck with the favorites stories/authors... but I managed!

Oh, as part of media studies or social anthropology or sociology, studies of what people do with their time and of creative efforts is entirely legitimate. Fanfiction's a huge phenomenon, so why shouldn't people study it?

As for the survey, what bothers me about it from the perspective of rigorous methodology is that it won't be valid or reliable. Forget sampling; it'd be far too hard to get valid and representative sample sizes for this kind of study in a tight time-frame. There are two main problems that I can see. First, people can fill in the questionnaire any number of times. There's no way of checking for multiple returns from the same person: you're not asked for an email address and there's no indication that an IP is collected. I tested: you can go back and fill it in again. Second, with it being passed around in different fandoms, the researcher has no control over who's filling it in and what fandoms they're from - though that's more easily explained away in a methods discussion than the first problem.

Also, I can't really see what she's going to do with the fic and author names or how they'll help her research.

Ah well, it's good to see fandom and fanfic getting attention


Wendy