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Fanfiction communities are actively engaged in creating cultural products. These large online communities have created and developed conventions that guide their solutions to gathering and presenting their work. The purpose of this paper is to investigate those conventions looking for evidence of information-related pursuits as serious leisure (SL) (Stebbins, 2007).

A diverse collection of fanfiction publishing platforms, blogs, and associated websites were subject to a qualitative inductive analysis (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Platforms included both generalist sites like Archive of Our Own and more focused sites such as Teen Wolf Fic Finder.

Findings show significant information-related activities around collecting, wayfinding, and organizing. Collecting centers on platform policies focused on scope. Wayfinding relates to peer review as well as various reference-like work including reader’s advisory, reference questioning, and the creation of pathfinders. Organizing looks to the unique organizational schema created and used by the fanfiction communities.

The authors explore implications of these activities in reference to the fanfiction community and the library and information science (LIS) discipline. The fanfiction community is shifting out of an ephemeral existence and into one of a more permanent digital heritage. Fanfiction is an SL pursuit that also has much to offer for consideration to the LIS discipline.

With respect to the wayfinding and organizing conventions of fanfiction communities, these activities provide librarianship with the opportunity to consider traditional activities in new ways.

Fanfiction is a little studied phenomenon in SL and in LIS. This research provides connections to both areas.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the state of contemporary publishing, specifically the realms of fanfiction and self-publishing, for the ways in which readership is represented in conjunction with authors and publishers within the publication process. The structure of this process is then compared with Robert Darnton’s communications circuit in order to propose a new model for the publication. As the publication process has a profound impact on the teaching and practice of collection development and reader studies in LIS, the discipline must be aware of any changes to the publication process.

Using the case study approach, this research examines the cultural product, Fifty Shades of Grey (FSOG). Evidence included fanfiction and self-published manuscripts, reader reception of these texts, and a timeline of how the texts developed.

Evidence gathered from the case study illustrate a variety of players and infrastructure present in the development and trajectory of FSOG. Throughout the entire development of the cultural product, readers were found to be active agents in the publication process promoting strong connections between reader and author. Findings focus on the themes of textual development and their publicity.

Proposes a new model for the publication process that includes fanfiction and self-publishing.

This pilot study explores how queer slash fanfiction writers reorient cis/heteronormative entertainment media (EM) content to create queer information worlds.

Constructivist grounded theory was employed to explore queer individuals' slash fanfiction reading and creation practices. Slash fanfiction refers to fan-written texts that recast cis/heteronormative content with queer characters, relationships, and themes. Theoretical sampling drove ten semi-structured interviews with queer slash writers and content analysis of both Captain America slash and material features found on two online fanfiction platforms, Archive of Our Own and fanfiction.net. “Queer” serves as a theoretical lens through which to explore non-cis/heteronormative perspectives on gender and sexuality.

Participants' interactions with and creation of slash fanfiction constitute world-queering practices wherein individuals reorient cis/heteronormative content, design systems, and form community while developing their identities over time. Findings suggest ways that queer creators respond to, challenge, and reorient cis/heteronormative narratives perpetuated by EM and other information sources, as well as ways their practices are constrained by structural power dynamics.

This initial data collection only begins to explore the topic with ten interviews. The participant sample lacks racial diversity while the content sample focuses on one fandom. However, results suggest future directions for theoretical sampling that will continue to advance constructs developed from the data.

This research contributes to evolving perspectives on information creation and queer individuals' information practices. In particular, findings expand theoretical frameworks related to small worlds and ways in which members of marginalized populations grapple with exclusionary normativity.

Writers, their practices, and their tools are mediated by the contexts in which they work. In online spaces and classroom environments, today’s writers have increased access to collaborators, readers, and reviewers. Drawing on our experiences as English teacher educators and as researchers of digital literacies and online affinity spaces, this chapter offers examples from three English teacher education programs in the United States and Australia to demonstrate how we link our research in out-of-school spaces to literacy practices in school contexts for our pre-service teachers. To do so, we share an illustrative example from each program and consider how in-class activities and assessment tasks can encourage pre-service teachers to learn about: the importance of clear goals and real-world audiences for writers; the value of self-sponsored, interest-driven writing in the English curriculum; and the role of authentic conversations between readers and writers as part of the writing, revising, and publishing process. The chapter concludes with recommendations for class activities and assessments that could be used within English education programs.

The purpose of this paper is to detail the perceived influence of early gaming habits toward media production from seven students enrolled at a university in the Southeastern US. Participants identified as heavily involved in creating media such as anime, videos, fanfiction, webcomics, games, and digital music.

This exploratory study used qualitative research, thus data collection and analysis included questionnaires, interviews, and artifacts identifying and categorizing six main themes: game play preferences, persistence, early connections between game play and media, support and feedback, creations inspired by games, and significance of games in current lives.

The study found that most participants believed game play in childhood influenced increasingly complex media production habits. Six of the seven believed game play influenced their career path. The paper concludes with implications for education including games as conduits to personalized learning and career paths.

Results from this study extend prior research on the value of games to promote media production and meet personal and professional goals. This is significant as prior research linking early game play to media production influencing career goals is sparse.

Play and playful literacies shape essential spaces for belonging, connection, transformation and joy: from embodied immersions into fantasy worlds, to the creation of interest-led groups overflowing with varied knowledges and identities, and the disruption of societal hierarchies through roleplayed restorying. Yet, theorizations delineating playful possibilities – while plentiful and varied – are often rigidly constructed in relation to neoliberally/biopolitically motivated notions of value, use and productivity. Imbued with forms of modern power, play’s full flourishing has been regulated and quelled, particularly within the realm of education. This study, a literature review, seeks to defy this fatuous notion of a frivolous play.

Drawing from research within the fields of literacy and educational studies, the author centers playful methods commonly trivialized in contemporary discourse, including in global out-of-school spaces (e.g. gaming clubs, improvisational theater groups), with popular culture texts (e.g. picture books, digital fanfiction) and for older youth and adults.

This exploration of play’s potential across lifespans, formal/informal learning ecologies and worldwide contexts foregrounds its intrinsic nature and essential entwining with socio-culturally/materially mediated forms of knowledge and communication.

With a unique focus on the playful literacies emerging across ages, spaces and places, this review advocates a turn toward the imaginative, messy, uncontrollable worlds of play in future research and practice.

This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions.

Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality.

The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community.

This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.

The growth of online social network sites and their conceptualization as affinity spaces makes them well suited for exploring how individuals share knowledge and practices around specific interests or affinities. The purpose of this study is to extend what is known about highly active/key actors in online affinity spaces, especially the ways in which they sustain and contribute to knowledge sharing.

This study analyzed 514 discussion posts gathered from an online affinity space on disease management. This study used a variety of methods to answer the research questions: the authors used discourse analyses to examine the conversations in the online affinity space, social network analyses to identify the structure of participation in the space and association rule mining and sentiment analysis to identify co-occurrence of discourse codes and sentiment of the discussions.

The results indicate that the quality and type of discourse varies considerably between key and other actors. Key actors’ discourse in the network serves to elaborate on and explain ideas and concepts, whereas other actors provide a more supportive role and engage primarily in storytelling.

This work extends what is known about informal mentoring and the role of key actors within affinity spaces by identifying specific discourse types and types of knowledge sharing that are characteristic of key actors. Also, this study provides an example of the use of a combination of rule mining association and sentiment analysis to characterize the nature of the affinity space.