I’m Casey Fiesler, a longtime fandom community member and also a professor in the Department of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. This semester I am teaching a research-based class in online fandom, and we are conducting a survey that covers many different questions of interest to information science or fan studies researchers about fanfiction! We do ask that you are at least 18 years old to participate; though this is mostly for a class project, we have gone through typical ethics review at our university and this study includes a consent form.
The survey is a mix of multiple choice and open answer questions, and you can answer as much or as little as you like. On average, the survey takes about 15 or 20 minutes to complete.
We will ask for some basic demographic information (any of which you can skip), but won’t require any identifying information – unless you want to give us your email address so that you can be updated about any results from the survey.
Because of some of the research questions that groups in my class want to answer it would be particularly great to get participants who write or read in the following fandoms: Sports RPF, Overwatch, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are also questions that relate to things like fandom lifecycles, videogame fanfic, identity in fanfiction, and ethics and privacy in fandom. Many of the questions in this survey were drafted by first-time student researchers!
Whether you participate or not, please consider sharing this survey with your social networks! And if you’d like to find out more about Casey’s previous research about fandom, see these Tumblr posts: Fan Platform Use Over Time and design of Archive of Our Own.
Reblogs are appreciated, and thank you! You can email me at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu if you have any questions or comments.
Based on some of the comments I’ve gotten about this survey, here are some FAQs!
1. My fandom wasn’t on the list of fandoms. 😦
That’s okay! This survey is actually a bunch of smaller surveys where individual groups in my class came up with their own research questions, and some were about specific fandoms. Though I tried to include a question or two that anyone could answer even if they weren’t in that fandom (in case, for example, there weren’t enough sports RPF writers to give my students enough data to analyze!), but for the most part, not being part of those fandoms just meant you had less questions to answer. Most of the survey was not fandom-specific!
2. I wish I could have skipped over questions that weren’t relevant to me.
You can! None of the questions in the survey are required (including, e.g., demographics). You can absolutely decline to anything anything you like, either because you can’t think of any answer, you don’t want to answer, or you just don’t want to take the time.
3. Some people both read AND write fanfiction on AO3!
Man, I’m impressed by the number of excellent survey designers there are among my participants. 😀 This is such a great point! In this case, the answers to that question were mostly just to get you to the NEXT question depending on your answers, so the distinction between “write and read” and “write and not read” wasn’t important.
4. How come I usually don’t ever find out what happened after I do surveys like this? Or: When will I see results from this?
I might write an entire post about this. 🙂 Remember that the process from conducting research to publishing findings is a looooooong road (often years!). I sometimes try to post some nuggets of findings sooner than that as a way to thank the community, but it’s not always easy to do. In this case, a big chunk of the survey is feeding into class projects, so there may or may not be interesting/useful findings, and I would also need permission from the students to share any of their work. However, some of the survey (in particular the privacy/ethics piece) is related to my own research and that of my PhD students, so that’s more likely to turn into something that I can share. As for when… hard to say!!!
5. Why did you ask about X and not Y?
There are SO MANY awesome things that could be explored about fandom, but this survey focused on specific research questions that students in my class were interested in.
6. I wanted to say more about X but you didn’t ask!
I thought about including even more open answer questions (of the “tell us more!”) variety but didn’t want the survey to be an hour long. 🙂 Some people are leaving more comments about parts of the survey in the last question, and that’s totally fine!
7. Some questions were confusing or didn’t seem to have the answer I would give as an option.
Designing good surveys is really hard. 😦 I hope that overall this wasn’t too much of a problem!
8. FANDOM IS A THING THAT ACADEMICS STUDY?!?!?!
Yep. 😀 And trust me, I’m far from the only one! One cool place to start is OTW’s academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures.
If you have any other comments or questions, you’re welcome to email me or send me a message here on Tumblr!
I’m Casey Fiesler, a longtime fandom community member and also a professor in the Department of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. This semester I am teaching a research-based class in online fandom, and we are conducting a survey that covers many different questions of interest to information science or fan studies researchers about fanfiction! We do ask that you are at least 18 years old to participate; though this is mostly for a class project, we have gone through typical ethics review at our university and this study includes a consent form.
The survey is a mix of multiple choice and open answer questions, and you can answer as much or as little as you like. On average, the survey takes about 15 or 20 minutes to complete.
We will ask for some basic demographic information (any of which you can skip), but won’t require any identifying information – unless you want to give us your email address so that you can be updated about any results from the survey.
Because of some of the research questions that groups in my class want to answer it would be particularly great to get participants who write or read in the following fandoms: Sports RPF, Overwatch, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are also questions that relate to things like fandom lifecycles, videogame fanfic, identity in fanfiction, and ethics and privacy in fandom. Many of the questions in this survey were drafted by first-time student researchers!
Whether you participate or not, please consider sharing this survey with your social networks! And if you’d like to find out more about Casey’s previous research about fandom, see these Tumblr posts: Fan Platform Use Over Time and design of Archive of Our Own.
Reblogs are appreciated, and thank you! You can email me at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu if you have any questions or comments.
At first Kara seems unaffected by her pregnancy. No nausea,
no aches or pains or inconvenient mood swings. Of course she credits it all to
her superior kyptonian genetics. No way she is going to be effected by
something as trivial as reproductive biology. Everyone nods sagely and agrees,
because they’ve all heard Alex bitching about how unfair it is that Kara was
genetically engineered for perfection, so it all makes sense.
Except for Alex. She doesn’t believe a word of it. She knows
Kara, she listened to Kara’s stories about growing up on Krypton and about
codex and the birthing chambers. She knows Kal-El was the first natural birth
in millennia, she knows how scandalous it was and she remembers Kara’s stories
about how Laura suffered through her pregnancy. She also knows what Kara looks
like when she is in denial and she can see her kryptonian is swimming in it.
When Alex tries to warn the others they don’t believe her,
because clearly Kara knows better, she is the kryptonian after all. Her ‘wanna
bet?’ becomes lots of bets, lots and lots of bets, at the DEO, CatCo, the alien
bar, everywhere. And Kara is so calm and unfazed that no one can believe that
she’ll end up hormonal, so they take the bets. But Alex knows Kara, and she
knows it’s only a matter of time, so she racks up the bets. Vasquez is the only
one who wont touch the bet, she knows better than to discount Alex when it
comes to Kara, she makes a few modest bets herself and uses her winnings for a
great baby present. Alex almost ashamed by how much money she is going to make,
but with a half kryptonian bun in Kara’s oven she knows their food bills are
going to go through the roof and her winnings are going to make a good start.
And then it happens, Kara wakes in the middle of the night
and she can hear a noise. A soft, soothing, rhythmic noise. It takes an
embarrassingly long time for her to realise it’s her baby’s heart beat, but
when she does, the wall crumbles and she is hit by the feels. All of the feels!
Alex is woken by the subsequent scream of “Holy Rao, I’m pregnant!” and spends
the rest of the night comforting Kara through the waves of tears, joy and panic
as reality sets in.
The next day the morning sickness hits with a vengeance,
quickly followed by mood swings and cravings and all the other stereotypical
symptoms. Kara is mortified at being a slave to her biology after all, but
people learn pretty quickly not to bring it up because, oh my god kryptonian
mood swings are scary. ‘Do not piss off the pregnant alien with heat vision’
becomes the new, unofficial, super-friends & DEO mantra.
Kara spends a lot of time painting and drawing, mainly scenes of krypton & her family. She has never been able to paint her family before, but now she finds it helps her feel closer to those she lost, and having their pictures on the wall makes it feel like they are somehow involved in the pregnancy. She also designs some kryptonian styled baby clothes which Winn makes for her. Clark gets the designs for traditional baby furniture from Kelex & the Jor-El A.I. and uses his farm boy skills to make them.
The clash when J’onn & Alex benched Supergirl has become
a DEO legend, but all known CCTV & sound recordings have been destroyed. No
one mentions it anywhere near the three of them, and they have learned the hard
way not to talk about it when Supergirl in on base (yes, her hearing really is
that good – see note about not pissing off the pregnant alien with heat vision).
Things calm down by the third trimester and the last few
months are relatively smooth sailing again, though she does burst into tears
every time she hears about a cat caught in a tree & they won’t let her go
save it because Supergirl has been benched. Luckily J’onn is completely wrapped
around her fingers by this stage and he becomes very good at saving wayward
animals on her behalf. (The teary relieved look and the hug he gets when he returns
makes it all worth it.)
Kara is inconsolable when her pregnancy makes the taste of
pot stickers change. At first she is sure that the shop changed the recipe and
Supergirl makes a personal appearance at the store to make them change it back.
They swear black & blue they haven’t changed a thing, & all the super
friends agree they still taste the same to them. There is a bit of muttering
about inferior human tastebuds, but she can tell the cook is telling the truth.
She is still half convinced that she is being pranked until Alex orders
potstickers from every store in National City and she realises they all taste
equally weird and has to admit she is the one that has changed.
Lena & Cat try to cheer her up by taking her on tours of
the city’s food outlets, ordering one of everything on the menu so she can find
some new favourites. Kara knows they are really just trying to get some veggies
& other healthy food into her, but the baby is making her hungry enough to
go along with it. She’s ends up horrified when her new favourite turns out to
be a vegetarian dish… With tofu! ‘Oh my Rao Alex, I’m eating tofu, this kid has
destroyed my tastebuds, please kill me now!’ Alex thinks it is hilarious and mocks
her about it at any opportunity. It’s also a great chance to resurrect her
childhood tease about Kara being part sun loving plant and calls her a cannibal
for eating her photosynthesis brethren. Alex gets very good at dodging pillows, and spends a lot of money on apology ice cream. At least pizza still tastes good.
One of the first things Alex did after learning Kara was
pregnant was enrolling in a massage class. By the time the muscle aches and
pains kick in Alex is a master and her magic massages have saved her from a melted face more than once. That, plus the line of kyrptonian proof toys and baby
products she (and Winn) have been making mean that she can get away with a lot
more than anyone else. Alex likes to think that her lifetime’s experience with
Kara’s puppy dog eyes has given her some level of resistance, but Kara knows a
little bit of bottom lip wobble, combined with a ‘for the baby’ will get her
just about anything she wants.
Kara danvers seems honest and open and bubbly but you could know her for 2 years and not know shes an orphan who’s entire family died and her sister is her foster sister and English is not her native language (not even that shes an alien, just that she isnt from this country) and she’s ripped as hell and wants to be a journalist because it’s about service and her mother was p much on the Supreme Court and her father THE most well known scientist and her aunt was a general and shes basically the equivalent of a Princess in her culture and shes actually v religious but it’s not Christian and has anxiety and PTSD and just the fact that Alex seems to know when her Earth birthday is, not even Winn really aware, who’s her best friend and Kara definitely knows everyone else’s on the entire floor like shes an absolute brick wall other than the things that are easily Google-able no one even knows who shes dating or if shes dating anyone and when she does all she says is she has a date (thinking back to the pilot) and she, an alien who has been to several different planets, told winn with a straight face there is no such thing as aliens besides superman
Whereas Lena tells a complete stranger her life story and befriends a reporter within like 2 days and let’s her know all the sordid details about her life and her tragic backstory and her mommy issues and what her relationship with her brother was like and will tell anyone her past relationships and every person knows about her family and that her moms in jail and what theyve done like there is no hiding anyway so might as well share shes a complete open book
Tl;dr Lena Luthor is Professor Open Book and Kara Danvers is the absolute brick wall professor that you dont even realize is the brick wall until Lena starts talking about her wife Kara and you didnt even know they were married or that her brother tried to kill her cousin and her mom hates her wife and her wifes sister is an FBI agent??????? That her wife sometimes consults for??? And her wife can easily kill a man. Like. Lena would be the one to reveal all of this and no one in Kara’s class even knows her age or that she had a wife or anything about her life other than what her favorite food is and that she likes red since she wears it all the time but she is literally the professor everyone loves and goes to talk to for office hours and ends up crying about whatever is troubling them and comes out feeling better and more hopeful only to realize later they found out absolutely nothing from her in return
Question of Smoke 