Session Chair: Ben Litherland
Presentation 1
THE ROLE OF THE DRAMA INTERPRETATION INDUSTRY IN THE TRANSNATIONAL RECEPTION OF KOREAN TV SERIES IN CHINA
Hui Lin
King's College London, United Kingdom
This article examines how the drama interpretation industry on video-streaming platforms influences the transnational reception of Korean TV series in China. Combined with new background music and the creators’ interpretations, drama interpretation videos extract drama clips from the long episodes and reproduce hours-long TV series into 3-5 minute short-form videos. With the rise of this industry, a lack of studies has noticed the phenomenon and its influence on transnational audience reception. Thus, this study is pioneering research to address how interpretative commentary videos affect audience reception of international TV series in China, how Chinese audiences engage with Korean TV content on user-generated platforms, and whether dissemination of clip-sharing on user-generated platforms benefits or detriments Korean TV series. Adopting the Korean drama Glory as a case, this study used qualitative content analysis, augmented by semi-structured interviews, to examine these user-generated interpretive videos and their associated comments on Douyin and Xiaohongshu. This study found that video creators replaced obscure terminologies with other terms familiar to audiences within a Chinese cultural context, and viewers mainly discussed characters in the Korean drama Glory without mentioning Korean culture or cultural differences. Therefore, this study argues that interpretive videos can be regarded as a form of user-generated localization of international TV series, making foreign dramas understandable to local audiences and helping with the dramas’ dissemination, while this re-production of TV series, which eliminates cultural differences, is detrimental to the spread of foreign culture.
Presentation 2
BRINGING #LINABELL TO LIFE ONLINE: A CASE STUDY IN THE CREATIVE AND COLLABORATIVE DYNAMICS OF CHINESE ONLINE FANDOM
. Saiyinjiya, Yuejie Gu, Yuruo Lei, Xingyuan Meng, Ioana Literat
Teachers College, Columbia University, United States of America
This article delves into the dynamics of online fandom in China through the lens of LinaBell, a pink fox character introduced as a mascot by Shanghai Disneyland in September 2021. Unlike traditional Disney characters, LinaBell lacks an official backstory or media presence. Yet she has rapidly gained immense popularity among Chinese Disney fans, largely through social media platforms like Weibo. Our study centers on the LinaBell Super Topic Community on Weibo, consisting of over 543,000 members known as “LinaBell’s moms.” Employing qualitative content analysis of posts and comments, this research examines fans' creative work, including videos, fanfiction, and memes around LinaBell, in order to understand the collective dynamics of Chinese online fandom. Our findings revealed two main themes: the collective personification of LinaBell through fan work, and the formation of a parakin bond with the character. The findings highlight the transformative role of social media in contemporary Chinese fandom as well as unveil a diverse landscape of participation, creativity, and community in Chinese culture through the prism of platforms like Weibo.
Presentation 3
Can I be queer in Wikidata? Practices of queer representation in a collaborative knowledge base
Daniele Metilli(1), Beatrice Melis(2,3), Chiara Paolini(4), Marta Fioravanti(5)
1: Department of Information Studies, University College London, United Kingdom; 2: Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy; 3: Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy; 4: Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics, KU Leuven, Belgium; 5: oio.studio
The progressive digitization and datafication that our society is undergoing is having a significant impact on our daily lives. Every day, biographical data about our identities is searched, generated, shared, reused, and analyzed for purposes of the most diverse nature. In many cases, these threats come from corporations or state actors, who wield data as an instrument of power. However, it is no less important to look at what happens in community-led platforms such as Wikidata, which also risk causing harm through their data practices. Wikidata is a structured knowledge base managed by a wide and transnational user community, who has a collective responsibility over a large and complex knowledge graph. Wikidata contains biographical data about more than eight million people, often including sensitive data such as gender identity and sexual orientation. In this paper, we analyze the historical changes in gender representation in Wikidata over a span of more than 10 years. We look at gender diversity in Wikidata through the lens of critical data studies, adopting an intersectional feminist and queer perspective that explicitly rejects the cis-heteronormative view of gender as a binary. We look at gender diversity from three complementary perspectives: model, to understand how gender is represented; data, to understand what/who is represented; community, to understand why certain choices have been made. We provide a comprehensive overview of the historical and current state of gender diversity in Wikidata, and in conclusion, we attempt to answer the overarching question “Can I be queer in Wikidata?”.
