Redesigned fandom sociolinguistics study!

If you’re seeing this in your inbox, then – as far as I know – you took a survey on language in fandom in February and said you were interested in getting updates on how that project progressed. If that’s no longer the case for you personally, you can use Buttondown to unsubscribe.

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Several months later, I finally have news!

Most importantly: the study was successfully restarted, there is now a new and improved survey up, and there’s more information centralized on the landing page currently. Which you may already have seen!

Context on why this is the case:

• The survey you took had to be taken down early and the study in question has been rebooted – and is now up and running.
• I’m working on a much more in-depth retrospective about why, but until then I do have one (1) on-the-record statement. Any more details will go out through this newsletter from now on.
• People who took the survey in February are still entitled to more information about how your responses were used – that’s the other in-depth thing I’m working on.
• I’m grateful for your time and patience, but need to note that only responses to this survey can be used for publicly-available research. Consider the version you saw a kind of alpha test.
• (The short version of ‘why’ is “miscommunications at my institution regarding the potential scope of the study itself and which level of IRB review would be necessary as a result.” The long version currently haunts my drafts.)

Here’s the new survey again, in all its heavily-randomized glory.

Parts of this may still seem familiar (as will this note if you’ve already seen the survey around), depending on your memory and my random number generators.

Some has been changed based directly on feedback I got in February.

Much is completely new! (I am sitting on my hands instead of talking about that! It is very difficult. I’m excited.)

As of now, the survey will close to new responses after September 16th – you have until then, if you haven’t filled it out already, or if you know someone else who may want to. If you have cookies enabled, you can take breaks and come back as needed as long as you’re on the same machine you started it with.

After it closes, I’m looking forward to (finally!) getting to talk about the survey design from my perspective also. That being said, I’m going to be offline for a lot of this summer for medical reasons, so this will all continue to move at the speed of not very fast. In the meantime, if you need me personally for anything or want to know what else I get up to, try this cheat sheet.

And here’s one more survey link for good measure, just in case you needed that on hand.

I hope you’ll continue to bear with me, because I’m really excited to see where this goes.

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