Introduction

The study of fans requires a methodological framework that can account for its social, creative, and affective features. My cases address textual and visual consumption as a lived experience and are investigated through methods from both the social sciences and the humanities. This study is interpretive and therefore relies on various qualitative rather than quantitative methods.

My methodology can be summarized in two ways. First, ethnography allowed me to collect information by participating in fandom both online and off-line. In addition, I used both informal and in-depth interview techniques to shed light on what fandom meant to my informants and how they viewed their creative practices. I did, however, also include my own affective experiences of fandom. By incorporating my own voice, I felt that I could better signify what certain creative and playful practices are like and what a source text does to fans.

Second, I have combined these social methods with a medium-specific analysis of the fan texts themselves and their source texts. This combination of narrative analysis and ethnographic methods is innovative and necessary. Important claims have been made to combine close reading with other types of data, such as in-depth interviews (see also Gray, 2003). A good example of this two-fold method is the study by Joke Hermes (2004), who discovered, in her research on detective novels, that fans highlighted specific textual structures that she had interpreted differently (pp. 79-96). My credo is that a scholar's method is related to the type of data that s/he wants to unearth and that one should not be afraid to use inventive methods to provide a valid overview.