Series

Shirley Chan
Preserving Marvels of Fandom: Constructing the Context of Marvel Cinematic Universe Fandom on Reddit and Tumblr
Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences 37
2025 | 338 p. | English

ISSN: 2001-7529
ISBN: 978-91-90055-16-8, 978-91-90055-17-5

Fan engagement on social media platforms presents significant challenges for digital preservation due to its dynamic character, spurred by the platforms’ data-generative and algorithmic features and commercial logic. These characteristics pose problems when capturing information about the context of fan engagement. If included in preservation, information about context could help shed light on fans’ creations and is crucial for future access, use and interpretation of the preserved material. Against this backdrop, this thesis provides a deepened understanding of preserving digital fan culture, specifically fan engagement on platforms, by focusing on how to construct context. The thesis develops two key archival concepts of provenance (e.g., the contextual origins) and appraisal (e.g., what is valuable to preserve), starting with how fans make meaning through their creation and use of information in the MCU fan communities on Reddit and Tumblr.
From a sociomaterial outlook and through ethnographic methods, the thesis explores the entanglement of fans and platforms expressed in various information activities among fans and their implications for constructing context. The thesis illustrates the multifaceted and evolving character of how fans make meaning in their activities, which is entangled with the platforms’ technological capabilities and commercial logic. The thesis’s contributions rest in proposing the concepts of cutting and binding context, which reconceptualize the notion of context
for the archival concepts of provenance and appraisal, by accounting for the inseparability of the social and technological in fan engagement as it evolves over time.