The European Fandom & Fan Studies Conference in tweets

[unjapanologist]

The European Fandom & Fan Studies Conference took place on November 10, 2012 at the University of Amsterdam. It was a relatively small one-day conference, but great in terms of content and people present. I was especially pleased to see so many researchers going beyond English-language online fandoms, tackling offline fan activities or doing comparative studies with other online fandoms that communicate in different languages. There was also a strong emphasis on how fans interact with media industries and deal with fannish activities that involve money, which is one of my favorite topics. I heard a ton of interesting ideas, and others clearly did too.

But I'll let our past selves speak for themselves. Here's a Storify with all the tweets from the #eurofandom tag, grouped by presentation as much as possible.

There were a couple of participants tweeting at least semi-regularly, and I'm surprised at how much of what happened at the conference comes across pretty well by looking at the tweets. With just a handful of Twitter-happy attendees plus Storify, it's very easy to leave a permanent record of the goings-on at any conference for anyone who wants or needs to see what was said there.

It's not a perfect system. The technology has to work, obviously; I attend plenty of conferences were wifi is still not assumed to be necessary, and even at this one, the network was a bit troublesome. Conferences with parallel panels also need at least a small group to cover everything more or less thoroughly. There were a couple of presentations during which all the really active tweeters happened to be in a different room, or temporarily comatose because of jetlag in my case, and these presentations are conspicuously absent from the timeline. Perhaps conferences should make a bigger deal out of live-tweeting to encourage more people to pick up the slack? And designate a conference historian to make the Storify later on.

(Crossposted from the Symposium blog)

Comments

[cathexys]

I clicked on the link saying to Alexis "I hate Storify" (bc of my twitter dislike) and then reading through the entire thing and, like you, thinking it gave a pretty good account (much better than trying to follow it live).

Thank you for doing that work!!!

(My immediate responses are, Protestant as identity politics? and yes, comments are always already part of the text; and Dan???? )

[unjapanologist]

Yeah, having everything in a non-moving chronological list does make a huge difference. I was actually just trying out how well I can take notes for myself via Twitter (having to write very concisely very fast is great training), but it turned out surprisingly useful! And fun. It's fun if other people are tweeting along and reacting.

(Dan said that fan studies as a field was not asking the right questions or something like that, apparently based on reading Jenkins and not much more? It was a weirdly uninformed and vaguely rude comment, IMO.)