Mythmoot Presentation: "Transformative Works as a Means to Develop Critical Perspectives ..."

[dawn_felagund]

I had to let the video upload on YouTube run overnight because of my current Internet situation but--at last!--the video of my presentation on Saturday at Mythmoot is finally ready. The full title (which is too long to fit in the title field) is "Transformative Works as a Means to Develop Critical Perspectives in the Tolkien Fan Community." The

Comments

[heartofoshun]

I have to leave for a doctors appointment. The handout looks great. I will review better. The video is hard to understand on my wonky laptop. I will have to try on the desk top. Or maybe the sound quality is better on the audio-only version. (Laura tells me all of the time that I am going deaf!)

Thanks for crediting me. I did not do much. I do hope some of these would-be Tolkien scholars look at our website! I still find only a few I read who know more about the texts than my best buddies at the SWG do.

[dawn_felagund]

The MP3 version isn't going to be any better if the video isn't coming through clearly because it's just the audio layer from the video. Did you try headphones? That's my go-to solution when my crappy laptop speakers are being especially crappy.

You had some of the most helpful comments, so don't sell yourself short! ;) I didn't offer much of a chance for detailed feedback on account of posting the draft so late and therefore not even offering to send a Word version for more detailed comments. But you pointed out what wasn't clear, what needed defining ... that can be the most helpful thing to me, as I've been living with this stuff for weeks/months now. Of course, it all makes perfect sense to me! :D

I still find only a few I read who know more about the texts than my best buddies at the SWG do.

Like I said on last night's post, I don't think it's a coincidence that, during the Mythmoot trivia for the past two years, the SWG members' teams have never placed lower than second. ;) mithluin and I were on the winning team last year; the three

[rhapsody11]

I have a headset on and the volume cranked up to the max: perhaps the sound was recorded on a lower volume. But I have the same Oshun. It goes a bit too fast for me (or am I getting old then? O-O), so I hit pause and listen again.

[dawn_felagund]

It sounded fine to me, volume-wise, last night when I listened to it to check that the sound worked all the way through. I did not have my sound all the way up either. The circumstances in which it was recorded weren't ideal. I arrived early to get Bobby the closest seat to where I'd be sitting, but it is still recorded on a handheld camera from several meters away and in a ginormous room. (My session was in the same room where the whole conference met for group sessions. The other rooms were tiny and probably had better acoustics.)

So it is what it is, unfortunately!

[binkaslibrary]

Congrats on the awesome presentation! It's a pity you had to limit yourself to 20 minutes. Do you have any plans as to what to do, how to use the data from your survey? I don't think I can imagine the possibilities.

[dawn_felagund]

Thank you! :) I could have gone on for an hour or more. I never have trouble talking, that's for sure, especially in front of a group. (I needed a glass of wine to handle the one-on-one stuff. But I can prattle on to a crowd for as long as they'll listen!)

I will finish my MA this fall. I then want to start working on publishing some of what I've been working in the past few years, including my fandom research. I would also love to continue giving talks/presenting papers on this stuff, if places are willing to have me. ;) And perhaps most importantly, as I continue to work through the data, I want to share it publicly with the fandom, kind of like Centrum Lumina has done with the AO3 Census, as well as on Fanlore, when applicable. I've had ideas about Tolkien fandom for a while now that I now have the data to support, so that's pretty exciting. :)

[binkaslibrary]

Oh, I'm good when it comes to talk to one person or a few people, in front of a crowd, I'm tense.

Actually, this wasn't, surprisingly, too fast for me, because it was loud enough. My hearing is bad, you know, so I need people to talk loudly to me. Otherwise, I sometimes don't bother to understand what they say ;)

[baranduin]

ooh, I know what I'm watching tonight when I get home!!

[dawn_felagund]

Excellent! I hope you enjoy it! :)

[baranduin]

Well, I read your handouts while eating lunch and can't wait to see more! You got a really good response to that survey, didn't you? As a business intelligence/data analyst myself, wouldn't I love to get my hands on that data, can't wait to see you use it more :-)

[dawn_felagund]

Thank you! :) I'm happy to share the data, although the survey is still ongoing and will be until December 2015 (when my IRB application comes up for renewal). But if you want it now or when it's finished or at any point in between, please do let me know. :)

I had 742 respondents at the time of download on Jan. 1, I think. It's at 794 right now. I was ... surprised by that, to say the least. On my IRB application, I estimated 100 participants and crossed my fingers that I'd get that many! Next paper: an investigation into why fandom participants apparently enjoy taking surveys! :D

[elfscribe5]

Bravo! Fandom has been an underground, often maligned endeavor. About the only time fandom gets coverage in the outside world is in a titillating, oh gasp! they're writing these characters having sex! kinda context. It's nice to see a scholarly presentation with a positive spin. :-D I immensely admire the fact that you did this. Fantastic that you got so many responses to your survey and I appreciated your analysis. I enjoyed watching your full presentation and really enjoyed your handout with the very creative use of color, organization, and calligraphy. It would never have occurred to me to do that and it made the presentation of your data much more engaging. As for the presentation, I find that reading out a paper, especially with time constraints, does tend to make one speak too fast. Being a fast-talker myself, I've had to learn over the years to slow down, enunciate much more than I normally would, and pause periodically -- take a beat -- to allow the audience to absorb what I'm saying, particularly if I've just said

[dawn_felagund]

Thank you! It probably says something that the first question I got about my topic, before I'd even presented (but when I told someone what I was going to be presenting on) was whether the SWG attempted to restrict erotica. I gave a very resolute, "Nope." I said it wasn't a huge part of the Silm fanfic community (compared to other fandoms), but we do allow it and have a genre tag for it. But it certainly speaks to the general perception of fanfic as "oh those perverts!!1!" and of the role of an archive that has garnered respect to be, in part, keeping out said "perverts." (I had to take out the line about the undersexed middle-aged cat ladies, unfortunately, which did address this stereotype

[pandemonium_213]

Finally have a chance to catch my breath today so I surreptitiously watched, or rather listened, to your entire presentation while addressing comments made on the last round of the clinical study report, which is now in document quality review (yet one more big beta! :^D

[dawn_felagund]

Yay for breath-catching time and thank you for using it to listen to meeee! :D

The yellow (I know exactly which graph you are talking about) was legible on the printout but definitely could have been clearer. Talking fast ... yes, this has always been an issue for me. (In presentations and conversations. Actually, I daresay conversations are worse ...) It remains something I'm working on. I recorded myself for my Ainulindale talk and didn't have a chance to do that this time. I practiced the same number of times as for "Tree of Tales," I think, but feedback on oneself is huge and I didn't have that this time.

I'd like to think this made an impact on your audience. :^)I hope so! It certainly ended up the inadvertent theme of the conference, I think, or one of them, with a huge announcement from Professor Olsen (that I alluded to in my opening remarks) about developing an imaginary Silm TV series as a way to study the books. One of the big takeaways from that was that he'd come to realize the role that fanfic actually can play as a

[huinare]

I noticed, however, that there wasn't a lot of "science of Middle-earth" themed talks, except from the guy who is the hydrogeologist from California,

Wait what, where? 8)

[pandemonium_213]

Don't get too excited. His talk didn't appear to be on hydrogeology, but (possibly) on wave function and harmonics?

Michael Basial, The Ainuphydalë: The Physics of the Ainur