Strikethrough07: Paper Plan

1. What are you trying to work out? What is the central problem?

How are narratives constructed communally online? How are stories constructed across several communities?

2. What is the significance of your study?

Narrative theory tends to focus on synchronic face to face communitcation. This study will use one example to suggest how similar processes appear in asynchronous mediated communication.
3. What is the scope of your study?

What are you including/excluding? Justify it!

This study focuses on one event in a large community online--"fandom" as a whole, which is rarely considered as a single community. This particular event unified fandoms and allowed fans to see themselves as a group. Why fandom? Because fans are fanatic--and there's a lot to sort through and look at. I am excluding the "other side"--the narrative of the "villains" for time's sake. And the spyware thing.

4. State your research question

What can Strikethrough07 show us about narrative building in online communities?

5. What are your data?

Posts from several communities created specifically to address the event, posts from individuals about the event, LiveJournal's press releases, transcripts of interviews provided by individual bloggers, and news stories/blogs about the event.
6. What body of theory/ies are you drawing on?
Narrative theory informed by Russian Formalists and Communication scholars