Self(ie)-Reflect
This week, you’ll be producing a crafted “selfie” that captures your current relationship with popular culture, ideally in a way that allows you to explore the connections with your scholarship through the lenses introduced thus far.
Make connections to the readings and anything that inspired your work, including both examples from the course materials and your own experience with craft outside of this course.
Digital Poetry
As we’ll be taking our inspiration from electronic poetry and narratives as a form of making this week, this is a free-form exercise in building your P5.js knowledge while exploring computational creativity. I’ve provided three starters that suggest different possibilities for working with P5.js to allow for moving or interactive text: after watching the video, explore their capabilities, and try making them your own. There are suggestions in each for ways to push the style, text, and design further. You can access them here: https://openprocessing.org/sketch/1392430
- Experiment with code and debugging. Try things, and break it. Consider loading in images, exploring , and think about how you can work from basic shapes and text to leave an impression. Remember, if you break things you can always go back and fork the original code.
- Change aesthetics and poetics. Play with the text, and think about how you can use text and color to convey emotion. Try building a mood, and consider branching out to draw in images or create a sense of space.
Annotated Bibliography
You will develop an annotated bibliography exploring perspectives and theoretical debates that have been central to the field of fan studies. There should be at least 5 annotations. They might include other topics more relevant to the your own research. What are the key contributions of fan studies literature to this larger field of inquiry? What models from these theoretical traditions have informed work in fan studies? This bibliography is intended to get you familiar with the field and the academic discussions surrounding fan studies. It is also a starting point for your final project and should include a brief abstract of what you hope to explore through that project.
Fan Autoethnography
You will write a short five-page auto-ethnography describing your own history as a fan of popular entertainment. You will explore whether or not you think of yourself as a fan, what kinds of fan practices you engage with, how you define yourself as a fan, how you became invested in the media franchises that have been part of your life, and how your feelings about being a fan might have adjusted over time.
FanSpace
You will create your own fandom space using Scalar, a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. You will choose a specific story world and provide your audience with a visual and textual representation of your interpretation and narrative.