The informational “cosplay journey” of Star Wars cosplayers in the context of a Facebook group
Issue Date
2023-09-15Author
Vardell, Emily
Thomas, Paul A.
Wang, Ting
Publisher
Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Show full item recordAbstract
INTRODUCTION. Research on personal information practices has increased in recent decades. Building on this current of thought, the present study explores information practices in the context of serious leisure, looking specifically at the Rey Cosplay Community Facebook group, an online community of Star Wars cosplayers. The work discusses how these fans seek, organize, and share relevant information during the process of making costumes.METHOD. This study used participant observation and semi-structured interviews to investigate information behaviours, including information seeking, organization, use, and sharing, of seventeen members in the Rey Cosplay Community with a purposive sampling strategy.ANALYSIS. The researchers transcribed and jointly coded the collected data with an open coding scheme to identify themes that emerged from the data.RESULTS. The cosplayers used a myriad of tools to seek, organize, and share information about costume making. Participants identified that their information practices had evolved over time, and they shared sophisticated strategies for sharing work-in-progress photos and updates as well as methods for organizing information for later use.CONCLUSION. There are a variety of information practices used when making a costume. Participants often seek and acquire relevant information on online platforms and use a combination of traditional physical tools and modern electronic tools to organize information. They also display a rich culture of sharing information when responding to other fans’ information needs. The overall structure that these information practices take can be neatly articulated as a sort of informational “cosplay journey”.
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Citation
Vardell, E., Thomas, P., & Wang, T. (2023). The informational “cosplay journey” of Star Wars cosplayers in the context of a Facebook group. Information Research an International Electronic Journal, 28(3), 37–58. https://doi.org/10.47989/ir283199
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