The team behind Fanhackers, the OTW’s project to make fan studies research accessible to fans, is excited to announce the relaunch of our WordPress site.
Over the past years, we’ve built a wonderful following on Tumblr with quotes from academic and non-academic research on fans. We’ll stick around on Tumblr, of course. However, the new site will be a more stable platform to preserve our content. It will also make it easier for us to expand to other platforms and to support non-blog projects that Tumblr can’t accommodate easily. This week will also see our Twitter account starting a regular schedule of updates, so if you’re active there please follow us!
What’s on the new site? The blog, first and foremost, and all the content shared by fannish and scholarly contributors since 2011 (remember when it was the Symposium blog?). We’ll keep filling the blog up with interesting news, quotes from new and old fan studies research, tips and tricks for tools and methods to study fan culture, and advice on how to contribute to the OTW’s open access journal Transformative Works and Cultures.
We also have a fan studies bibliography that contains almost 3,000 items. The new website offers a more accessible introduction to the bibliography and a simpler way to search our treasure trove of academic work on fans. It also sets the stage for some very exciting new bibliography functionality that will help us make this research easier to find, read, and interact with.
Part of the OTW’s mission is to ensure that better information about fans is available to fans and the general public alike. Fanhackers has been key in this mission, sharing research with fans and providing greater insight into fan studies history by highlighting key works and collecting what’s already out there. If you’d like to see interesting snippets about what’s getting written and researched, why not subscribe to Fanhackers on Tumblr, Twitter or the RSS feed of our revamped WordPress site?
Similarly, if you have any questions or suggestions for how the project can better serve your needs, please don’t hesitate to reach out!