Fanfic Forensics

The data sets that (will) contain all info extracted from dojinshi and fanfic samples are now publicly available; updates made to them will show up at once. These sets will be the basis for a comparison of Japanese and English-language fanworks later on. Links are in the right-hand menu on the main site. The data sets are being compiled using Zoho Creator, a spiffy online database application that's easy to use and tweak for non-experts. It also has a good mobile interface, allowing ridiculously easy data input while on the go. (Perhaps not the most useful thing since the wheel, but close enough for me. No more scribbling on the back of beer mats or hands and then wasting time re-typing ideas, when they haven't been lost altogether in that space where loose bits of paper go to die.) With the data sets out there, this research can finally be called an open notebook science project. Yay :) In very generalized terms, that means all data produced while researching are made public online, in as close to real time as possible, in the assumption that this will speed up the spread of knowledge and help other researchers avoid unnecessarily repeating the work and the mistakes of colleagues. Check out this post at Digital Humanities or Jean-Claude Bradley's UsefulChem blog for more details on the principle. I tried applying it during my first now-dead research project a couple of years back; then, I lacked the knowledge and the time to carry it out properly. Now I've finally managed to both use web tools for absolutely everything research-related and aggregate the data created with those varied tools on one main website. Random research ideas via Twitter, data from samples and glossary lists via Zoho Creator, annotated references via Diigo, project updates and other thoughts via the blog, and assorted information stuffed into the Drupal CMS. It took just about forever to make all that work together in ways that are both sensible and not fatally complicated. The final frontier will be making all that aggregated stuff full-text searchable from one and the same search box. (Great fun, but the point of all that for other researchers working in the same field as I is debatable, yes. Very few people will have both the time and the inclination to slog through thousands of database entries, blog posts, papers, tweets and annotated bookmarks, particularly this early in the project, when everything is still half-finished at best. Nevertheless, I think the principles behind open notebook science are worth the effort even if the results may not be incredibly usable at once. It's very much a work in progress: these research results can definitely be made more accessible and more useful for more people, and I'll continue to work on that.)