New research alert! Research about research, actually!

A couple of years ago we recruited here (and elsewhere) for interview participants for a research study about fat people's experiences online. As part of that study we also asked for thoughts about how to ethically conduct such research, both in online communities and in human-computer interaction research more generally. This short paper was presented as a poster at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. Led by PhD student Blakeley Payne, this also won the conference's Best Poster Recognition! <3

"How to Ethically Engage Fat People in Research"

(1) Choose respectful language. Use participants' own self description in conversation and reporting. Consider the connotations of euphemisms and medicalizing language. We recommend "fat" as a default term to use until participants or the context indicates otherwise.

(2) Consider positionality and practice reflexivity. Fat people are not a monolith but are experts in their own lived experiences. Engage with the history of fat oppression, especially as facilitated by research and medical institutions. Consider your positionality with respect to this history.

(3) Rethink assumptions around weight loss. Don't assume fat people are unhealthy and/or want to lose weight. Interrogate "weight loss" as an embedded design value and its potential for harm. Use notions of health that are weight-neutral such as Health at Every Size.

(4) Engage fat people in research. Fat people want to be engaged in technology design and research! Center fat people's voices, needs, and desires when choosing research questions and methods.

Citation and (open access!) link to full paper: Blakeley H. Payne, Jordan Taylor, Katta Spiel, and Casey Fiesler. 2023. How to Ethically Engage Fat People in HCI Research. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 117–121. https://doi.org/10.1145/3584931.3606987

Tumblr is not dead, long live Tumblr!

Last month a French journalist asked me whether Tumblr was experiencing a revival in the wake of migration from Twitter, especially in the context of fandom. It turned out to be an interesting article! Reproducing below as translated into English by Google (so my apologies for errors in the translation - link to the original above).

Thank you!

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in and/or shared our research study about Twitter.  We got a lot more participants very quickly (both from this and other platforms) and so unfortunately we’ve had to close the survey to further participation due to the constraints of our university ethics approval.

BUT!  Watch this space because the Twitter Eulogy Project will be coming back in another form. :)

And in the meantime, if you would like to share your feelings about Twitter in a non-academic-research way, the folks at Better Platform are also running a similar survey of their own. Check it out! 

Calling (current or former) Twitter users!

Would you miss Twitter if it were gone? What would you say at Twitter’s funeral?

We are researchers at University of Colorado Boulder conducting a survey about how people think about the role of Twitter in their lives, given recent changes to the platform. If you are at least 18 years old and a current or former user of Twitter, we’d love to hear from you! (And feel free to share!)  

I wrote this.

Love or hate TikTok for whatever reasons, I think that for any social media platform it’s really important that we contextualize the risks with the benefits. So this is just a little reminder that TikTok (like Tumblr, or Instagram, or any place where people still gather) DOES have benefits and that there would also be harms if it were suddenly gone. 

Social media is bad for us. Social media is also good for us—both of these things can be true at the same time. And I hope that everything that’s happening can lead us toward meaningful regulation that will get us to more of the good and less of bad, far beyond just TikTok - because I’d like to see platforms be better, not gone.

Nice popular press article about fandom migrations (with a focus on LiveJournal and Tumblr) from someone who was clearly there! In case it hasn’t been obvious already, I was also there, though I confess, I’ve never been brave enough to mention Pornish Pixies by name in an academic article LOL.

For more on this from me: 

“Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities” (the published academic article version)

“The Life and Death of Fandom Platforms” (YouTube video essay)

“Mass migration from Twitter is likely to be an uphill battle – just ask ex-Tumblr users“ (the recent “how does this apply to Twitter” piece)

“Her name is Irene Adler,” said Mycroft. “There are many names for what she does, but she prefers the term sacrifice.” In honor of Sherlock Holmes’ official entire entrance into the public domain, I wanted to share a fanfiction that I wrote almost a decade ago, for Yuletide. It is based on a short story that also exists because of public domain works (Sherlock Holmes and the Lovecraft mythos): “A Study in Emerald” by @neil-gaiman​ which is a favorite of mine. :) 

This was fun to write because it brought together so many different elements of other people’s stories. But borrows the most heavily from “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “A Scandal in Belgravia” in addition to the short story.

(Also this is the AO3 account that I used when wanting to share something using my real identity, like here. :) )

Happy “Sherlock Holmes is finally in the public domain” day!

Because the character of Sherlock Holmes did not originate in a single work, but rather a series of short stories that were published over time (between 1887 and 1927), though the character has been in the public domain due to expired copyright for some time, only as he appeared in the early stories. 

So though e.g. BBC paid licensing fees to the Conan Doyle estate to be on the safe side, there have also been lawsuits splitting hairs about whether a particular portrayal of the character contained elements that were still under copyright. A 2014 U.S. Court of Appeals case established that yes, Sherlock Holmes the character was in the public domain, copyright protection would still apply to elements that only appeared in later stories--for example, Holmes’ love of dogs and Watson’s marriages.

So what about this guy?

Conan Doyle’s estate actually sued Netflix over the film Enola Holmes because they claimed that Sherlock’s character was too “warm” and had “more respect for women” than he did in the earlier, public domain stories. The lawsuit went away - rightfully, because I cannot imagine any world in which Netflix lost that case - but as of today, we no longer have to worry about such silly lawsuits. Because as of today every one of Conan Doyle’s portrayals of Sherlock Holmes is officially in the public domain!

Of course, keep in mind that this applies to Conan Doyle’s work and not other portrayals of Sherlock Holmes that might have their own copyrighted elements. So if you’re writing Johnlock fanfic that is very clearly based on the BBC version, maybe keep it noncommercial. :)

Also here’s a video if you want to hear me talk about this for 3 minutes instead!

I have a question for you! What do you think today’s biggest fandoms are, and which fandoms are biggest on which platforms?

The image above was made for a 2018 Slate article based on survey data from our migration study (conducted in early 2018). In the survey we asked respondents what their primary fandom was for each platform they reported using. 

I was just thinking about how this would look different if we did the survey today! What new platforms and new fandoms would be on here... what do you think? 

This is my TENTH year of sharing my favorite novels I’ve read each year on social media. (I was doing it before it was cool I guess. :-p ) Anyway, here’s my list for 2022! And at the link you can find every other year’s recs. (Also yes I know that the John Green book is cheating because it’s not fiction but it was a really important book for me so wanted to include it. <3 )

TL;DR Fans are very good at collective action. Like, remember how Archive of Our Own started with a LiveJournal post saying: hey can’t we do this ourselves? I’m always just amazed by what fans can accomplish. :)

Here is a link to the video I’m referencing, about a recent incident where fans banded together to help folks whose fanfic was being stolen. 

Also here are links to my Slate story and paper about AO3 referenced here.

I hope y’all don’t mind the occasional TikTok share! Sometimes there are nice prompts for talking about fandom stuff over there.

Someone does not know how murder mysteries work.

P.S. I really, really liked this movie. And if you’ve seen it, I’m sure you know on whose behalf he is offended (re: “politics”) and well, based on some of my recent Tumblr posts you’re probably not surprised to hear that I especially liked that part. :)

[Screenshot of tweets from Ben Shapiro: “I regret to inform you that ‘Glass Onion’ is actively bad. I will discuss first the actual writing of the movie followed by the politics of it. Both suck. SPOILERS follow. First, the writing. The first hal of the movie is a complete misdirect and waste of time.]