scholarly journals Text mining, Hermione Granger, and fan fiction: What's in a name?

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Leigh Rowe ◽  
Tolonda Henderson ◽  
Tianyu Wang

When fans rewrite characters, how do they engage that character's identity and the social constructions around it? Fan fiction writers resist, replicate, and create oppressive social systems by changing characters between published and fan texts. As such, fan studies scholars have long been interested in how fans construct characters, an interest that has often been paired with readings of race, gender, and sexuality. Digital humanities can help confirm and nuance extant fan studies scholarship around specific characters popular in fan fiction. We used Word2Vec software to mine the text of 450 pieces of fan fiction based on J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. By focusing on the depiction of Hermione Granger in both Rowling's novels and Harry Potter fan fiction, we tested how text mining character names can reveal properties closely tied to a specific character through the relationships between the target name and other characters. Analysis via Word2Vec found that "Hermione" is used grammatically and contextually differently in the books (in which she is most like Harry and Ron) than in our fan fiction corpus (in which she is most like other girls/women). This difference suggests that these fans have a specific reading of Hermione that is communally understood even if Rowling's diction offers a different reading.

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mookgo S Kgatle

Social-scientific criticism refers to an interpretation of the biblical text that takes into cognizance the social system that produced that text. This article presents a social scientific reading of the faith of a Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21–28. The article outlines models of social systems in Matthew 15:21–28 like landscape and spatiality, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, purity, and social status in order to achieve a social scientific reading. The purpose of this article is to firstly demonstrate that the models of social system in Matthew 15:21–28 served as boundaries to the faith of a Canaanite woman. Secondly, it is to demonstrate that the Canaanite woman crossed such boundaries in Matthew 15:21–28 for her daughter to receive healing. Lastly, the Canaanite woman serves as a model for South African women today who have to cross boundaries like landscape and spatiality, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, purity, and social status.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne R. Black

Digital fan fiction challenges the sovereignty of the literary object and necessitates a reevaluation of textuality. Fan fiction may be taken as a form of networked digital narrative that exists electronically and shares features with the printed book. With a focus on the paratext as a site of transaction between fan fiction writers and readers, it is possible to attend to a negotiation between work and text. By using computational methods—word frequency analysis, topic modeling, and decision trees—to analyze fan fiction paratexts as they are used on the online fan fiction repository Archive of Our Own, it is possible to reevaluate the fan fiction paratext and the notion of the fan fiction text.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Dunn

Marshalling evidence from critical feminist studies of eating disorders (Bordo; Malson and Burns; Warin), including Leslie Heywood’s concept of anorexic “logic,” this dissertation theorizes how anorexic rationality and subjectivity are expressed through the popular figure of the post-feminist action heroine, specifically within young adult (YA) speculative fiction franchises. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels (2005-2008), Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series (2008-2010), and Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy (2011-2013) serve as the primary, and I argue ideal case studies for this investigation. Emerging as top-selling YA series in the post-Harry Potter era, all three franchises feature teen girl protagonists with post-feminist “sensibility” (Gill), and with their mass appeal, have given rise to global fandoms. Hence, this project also examines reader responses to the series under discussion through a selection of online fan fiction in which female-identifying youth rewrite their protagonists as anorexic. Although media studies scholars have analyzed the gendered discourses surrounding contemporary female action heroes (Inness; Brown; Wright), and feminist literary scholars have explored how motifs of weight, starvation and consumption function within certain narratives (Daniel; Ellmann; Karlin; Meuret; Silver), the correlation between anorexia and action heroine texts has yet to be systematically studied. This investigation is all the more crucial given Parliament of Canada’s 2014 report, Eating Disorders Among Girls and Women in Canada, which notes that eating disorders have the highest mortality rates of all mental illnesses. Responding to the report’s call for increased research on media messaging aimed at youth, this dissertation focuses on mass media franchises targeted at girls and young women, the largest demographic of eating disorder sufferers, arguing that contemporary teen action heroine mythology reflects and reifies a problematic value system that mutually constitutes conceptions of starvation and justice, and informs the social construction of ideal femininity. This research thus forges new pathways between theories of girlhood, body image studies, and YA literature to offer a theoretical framework for reading female heroism that places the corporeal matrix of gender, consumption, and embodiment at its centre.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Dunn

Marshalling evidence from critical feminist studies of eating disorders (Bordo; Malson and Burns; Warin), including Leslie Heywood’s concept of anorexic “logic,” this dissertation theorizes how anorexic rationality and subjectivity are expressed through the popular figure of the post-feminist action heroine, specifically within young adult (YA) speculative fiction franchises. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels (2005-2008), Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series (2008-2010), and Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy (2011-2013) serve as the primary, and I argue ideal case studies for this investigation. Emerging as top-selling YA series in the post-Harry Potter era, all three franchises feature teen girl protagonists with post-feminist “sensibility” (Gill), and with their mass appeal, have given rise to global fandoms. Hence, this project also examines reader responses to the series under discussion through a selection of online fan fiction in which female-identifying youth rewrite their protagonists as anorexic. Although media studies scholars have analyzed the gendered discourses surrounding contemporary female action heroes (Inness; Brown; Wright), and feminist literary scholars have explored how motifs of weight, starvation and consumption function within certain narratives (Daniel; Ellmann; Karlin; Meuret; Silver), the correlation between anorexia and action heroine texts has yet to be systematically studied. This investigation is all the more crucial given Parliament of Canada’s 2014 report, Eating Disorders Among Girls and Women in Canada, which notes that eating disorders have the highest mortality rates of all mental illnesses. Responding to the report’s call for increased research on media messaging aimed at youth, this dissertation focuses on mass media franchises targeted at girls and young women, the largest demographic of eating disorder sufferers, arguing that contemporary teen action heroine mythology reflects and reifies a problematic value system that mutually constitutes conceptions of starvation and justice, and informs the social construction of ideal femininity. This research thus forges new pathways between theories of girlhood, body image studies, and YA literature to offer a theoretical framework for reading female heroism that places the corporeal matrix of gender, consumption, and embodiment at its centre.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Duggan

Who reads and writes fan fiction—and why—has long been a central concern of fan studies. Indeed, many of the foundational works in the field of fan studies aim to answer this question. These early studies set a paradigm for our understanding of who makes up fan fiction–centered communities nearly thirty years ago; however, it is clear that the paradigm is now outdated. To my knowledge, there are no wide-scale academic studies of how fan fiction authors identify themselves in online profiles, authors' notes, and other self-descriptive texts, although some fans have produced statistics. Rather, our understandings of fan fiction–centered communities instead rest on our own embedded experiences as fans. While our experiences are valuable, recent work has made it clear that focusing solely on our embedded perspectives may exclude a number of voices, experiences, and viewpoints from scholarly work. This article presents the results of a qualitative study that examines how fan fiction authors described themselves in the paratexts of 1,939 Harry Potter fan fiction works posted to Archive of Our Own (AO3)—over 1 percent of the Harry Potter fan fiction posted to AO3 at the time of the study. It aims to indicate demographic trends within the Harry Potter fandom, identify groups of fans who may have been elided from fan studies' core discourse, discuss why who writes fan fiction matters, and uncover future areas of research concern.


2014 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Cuntz-Leng

Among the large group of Harry Potter fans who write their own stories about the boy wizard, his friends, and his foes, and publish them on the Internet, some are interested in the exploration of the erotic and romantic bond between identical twins. Because the Harry Potter saga features two sets of identical twin pairs of different gender—the Weasley brothers and the Patil sisters—the series not only provides a unique playground for the recipients in terms of the possibilities for twincest stories; more importantly, it offers ample opportunity for researchers to examine how fans actually use such pairings. In this essay, the examination of twin relationships as portrayed within Rowling's works, the movies, and in twincest fan fiction are confronted with each other to outline how Rowling's different concepts of the sibling pairs and the author's general ongoing interest in doubling motifs is consistently expanded by fan fiction writers to discuss the complex relationship between source and fan text.


2014 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darlene Rose Hampton

Media fans often refer to their texts, practices, productions, and selves as works in progress—unfinished, in-between, and transformative. This article applies theoretical models of performance to the fannish practice of crafting slash fan fiction within LiveJournal communities. By examining the content and form of the fiction itself, its mode of production, and fannish interactions, this paper discusses fan practices as opportunities for media fans to engage in individual and collective performances that negotiate hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality. These negotiations often illustrate a disconnect between social conditioning and female desire in heteronormative and patriarchal culture, and demonstrate the utility of theories of performance in studying individual and collective fannish engagement with texts as a means of intervening in the world.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam G. B. Roberts ◽  
Anna Roberts

Group size in primates is strongly correlated with brain size, but exactly what makes larger groups more ‘socially complex’ than smaller groups is still poorly understood. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) are among our closest living relatives and are excellent model species to investigate patterns of sociality and social complexity in primates, and to inform models of human social evolution. The aim of this paper is to propose new research frameworks, particularly the use of social network analysis, to examine how social structure differs in small, medium and large groups of chimpanzees and gorillas, to explore what makes larger groups more socially complex than smaller groups. Given a fission-fusion system is likely to have characterised hominins, a comparison of the social complexity involved in fission-fusion and more stable social systems is likely to provide important new insights into human social evolution


Author(s):  
Gabriela Soto Laveaga

In my brief response to Terence Keel’s essay “Race on Both Sides of the Razor,” I focus on something as pertinent as alleles and social construction: how we write history and how we memorialize the past. Current DNA analysis promises to remap our past and interrogate certainties that we have taken for granted. For the purposes of this commentary I call this displacing of known histories the epigenetics of memory. Just as environmental stimuli rouse epigenetic mechanisms to produce lasting change in behavior and neural function, the unearthing of forgotten bodies, forgotten lives, has a measurable effect on how we act and think and what we believe. The act of writing history, memorializing the lives of others, is a stimulus that reshapes who and what we are. We cannot disentangle the discussion about the social construction of race and biological determinism from the ways in which we have written—and must write going forward—about race. To the debate about social construction and biological variation we must add the heft of historical context, which allows us to place these two ideas in dialogue with each other. Consequently, before addressing the themes in Keel’s provocative opening essay and John Hartigan’s response, I speak about dead bodies—specifically, cemeteries for Black bodies. Three examples—one each from Atlanta, Georgia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Mexico—illustrate how dead bodies must enter our current debates about race, science, and social constructions. 


Author(s):  
Volodymyr Ryabchenko

There are following prerequisites outlined in this article: worldwide democratization trend; complexity of structures of social systems; growing needs in human capital development; autonomy of national higher education institutions; civilizational problem of Ukraine in national elite. Conceptual problems on a road to real democracy in higher education institutions were actualized and analyzed. Determined and characterized three models of higher education institutions activities based on the level of democratization needs of their social environment as: negative, neutral and favorable.


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