Addressing Methodological Challenges: A New Approach to Tracing Participation Patterns in Online Writing
Alecia Marie Magnifico (University of New Hampshire, USA)
Jen Scott Curwood (University of Sydney, Australia)
Jayne C. Lammers (University of Rochester, USA)
Wednesday 4th July, Paterson’s Land rm 1.26, 12-2pm
Full details and link to sign up:https://www.de.ed.ac.uk/event/seminar-addressing-methodological-challenges-new-approach-tracing-participation-patterns
Abstract
Scholars of media literacy have described a range of ways adolescents use digital tools and spaces to conceptualise, produce, and share creative works. However, research often has focused on the experiences of young expert creators, even as the field acknowledges the importance of activities like archiving, lurking, reading, liking, reviewing, and sharing original and transformative works. Few researchers have devised methods to trace or describe these broader, more common participation patterns. In this presentation, we draw on our online ethnographic research to address this challenge by focusing on feedback that fanfiction authors receive from their readers. We then outline a linguistic analysis method for understanding fanfiction reviews and detail how it allows us to trace online interactions. We argue for a move away from space-based framing into more transliteracies approaches to addressing the methodological challenges of tracing participation patterns in online writing. We share examples from our fanfiction dataset and involve participants in a hands-on workshop with coding, analysing, and making sense of participation patterns and practices within online writing.