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ATNU Virtual Speaker Series -Suzanne R. Black - 2024-10-28

Our next speaker in the ATNU Virtual Speaker Series is Dr Suzanne R. Black from CoSTAR Foresight Lab at the University of Edinburgh who will talk to us about "New literary canons: A digital approach to reviews of fanfiction on Goodreads". 

Join us on Monday 28 October 2024 at 5:30pm UK time. (We will send the zoom link to all registered attendees shortly before the event.)  

"New literary canons: A digital approach to reviews of fanfiction on Goodreads"
Suzanne R. Black (University of Edinburgh)
Monday 28 October 2024
5:30pm (GMT) (10:30am PDT, 1:30pm EDT)  [Check your timezone here!]

REGISTER HERE!

Abstract:  

Literary canonicity is a politically and commercially inflected category as determining which texts are considered ‘classics’ affects how those texts are received, taught, marketed and sold. Fanfiction texts have typically existed outside of commercial and institutional forms of evaluation: they are not regularly selected for inclusion on university syllabi, featured on bestseller lists, or awarded prestigious prizes. However, the crowd-sourced book review site Goodreads.com allows born-digital fanfiction to be listed and reviewed along with commercially published novels. This sharing of digital space by commercial and amateur writing challenges literary boundaries and definitions, where the language of ‘classics’ and ‘canonicity’ is employed by reviewers to make claims about certain fanfiction texts. My work uses topic modelling, a machine learning method for identifying the possible themes in a corpus of texts too large for one human to read, on a dataset of 10,000 of the book reviews of fanfiction that exist on Goodreads. I examine how readers define what literary value means in the context of fanfiction, what constitutes a ‘fandom classic’, and what is at stake in establishing new literary canons. This project works to understand the place of fanfiction amongst other forms of literature and capture insight into contemporary readers’ views on literary value.

Bio: 

Dr Suzanne R Black received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh for doctoral work examining the interconnections of a range of literatures, including fanfiction, in the twenty-first century digital literary sphere. She combines humanities approaches with digital methods and her research interests lie in the development of data-led approaches to contemporary fiction and fanfiction. She currently works as a postdoctoral research associate on the CoSTAR Foresight Lab at the University of Edinburgh. Twitter: @SuzanneRBlack.

Last modified: Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:25:07 BST