I hope you have found the posts so far to be enjoyable and thought provoking.
Today's post comes from Eleanor Gerrard, ALIA Sydney's own Event Officer.
Since completing my information studies degree,
I have constantly been dazzled by the sophisticated and often surprising ways
in which people seek to structure, organise and store information in their
everyday lives. Nowhere is this more apparent than in online fan communities,
where thousands upon thousands of people who have never met gather and (perhaps
unintentionally) create some of the most impressive metadata structures I have
seen. This is all in the pursuit of finding and storing online information
relating to the thing they love.
The My
Anime List homepage
You may ask why anyone might be interested in
keeping a personal, online log of what animated cartoons they’ve seen, and from an outside perspective, I
wouldn’t blame you! But as
an anime fan, I instantly saw the benefit of signing up and creating a database
of my own. Like with many fandoms, anime fans are intrinsically aware of the
different categories and sub categories which anime falls into. This can be
difficult to grasp, considering that it is based on a distinct categorical
hierarchy. As anime is a visual medium, visual signifiers often come to
classify an anime before plot and themes. For example, the wildly popular anime
and manga series Death Note belongs to the supernatural fiction
and shonen jump (boys action) genres. While the series Madoka Magica could
also be considered supernatural fiction due to its dark themes and
magical elements, fans recognise that it is first and foremost a shōjo (girls) or mahō shōjo (magical
girl) genre piece, thus separating it into a separate category and the same
sub-category.
Since most anime fans follow multiple story
lines across multiple genres, and given that there are over 3000 anime titles
to date, it stands to reason that a personal database or log of each anime
series, where you are up to in it, what it is, and how much you like it, could
be very useful to anybody with an interest in this area.
Using My Anime List,
fans are able to find and categorise their anime based on which stage they are
progressing in watching it with. Users can indicate whether the anime is one
they are currently ‘Watching’,
have ‘Completed’,
have ‘Planned
to Watch’ or have ‘Dropped’.
Each anime is then further classified based on what type of anime it is (for
example, TV show or Original Video Animation - OVA), how many episodes they
have seen, when they began and finished watching it, and how much they liked it
(giving it a rating out of ten). This metadata then gives the user a median
score of how much they like the anime they watch, how much of each type they
watch, and (scarily) how many days they
have dedicated to watching anime overall.
My
personal anime list, showing how information is organised using the site’s
metadata
It is clear from observing this page that the
fan community has a very distinct idea of what type of information is important
to them, and how they wish to be perceived when compared to the wider
community. It also assists the user, at a more rudimentary level, to keep track
of the often overwhelming amount of information they must process, store and
share with one another in order to be considered a part of this community.
Overall, I think that studying information
management and library systems in online fan communities can give a fascinating
insight into the way in which people think. What we can learn is that the need
to classify, store and organise information is a fundamentally human
characteristic, which extends far beyond the professional world.
Do you belong to any fan communities which also
use complex and interesting information storage systems? Share your thoughts
below!
Eleanor Gerrard
ALIA Sydney Event Officer
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