Browse Items (17 total)

The origins of tumblr come out of a history of internet blogging, which itself comes from online journals sometime around 1994. Here, people would chronicle the events of their day and post their thoughts. Over time, these individual musings became…

Internet forums, or message boards, began to take shape in the 90’s, but their roots extend back around twenty years prior with the advent of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in 1978. Functioning, appropriate to their name, like a virtual bulletin board,…

At the 2019 WorldCon in Dublin, Ireland, the fanfiction forum Archive of Our Own (AO3) was presented with the Hugo Award for Best Related Work. While fan publications such as fanzines had been presented since 1955, AO3 winning the award represented…

In July 2014, a fan screening of fan short film “Prelude to Axanar” took place at San Diego ComicCon. The project would serve as a prequel to their feature length film “Axanar.” Crowdfunded on kickstarter, Axanar raised over $1.2 million, catching…

In 2007, a group of fans founded a nonprofit organization whose commitment was to "serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture" (https://www.transformativeworks.org). The OTW provides…

On October 1, 1999, a twelve year old homeschooled boy from Indiana with a working knowledge of html and a passion for Harry Potter decided to create a website. Titled Mugglenet, the fansite became wildly popular within a year of its founding, and…

The September 1974 issue of Grup, an Adult rated Star Trek fanzine, featured a story titled “A Fragment Out of Time.” Featuring Spock and an unnamed second character who can very easily be inferred as Kirk, the story presented the first case of…

The first official Science Fiction convention was held in New York from July 2-4, 1939. The event coincided with the New York World Fair and was held in Caravan Hall, hosting around 200 attendees. The event would later become known as WorldCon, a…

In 1930, the first of what would later become known in the fan world as a “fanzine” was published. Titled “The Comet,” it was produced in Chicago in 1930 by Raymond Arthur Palmer and the Science Correspondence Club. These early fanzines consisted…

The first instance of “canon” referring to the distinction between the official text written by an author to differentiate it from fan-created works occurred in scholarship surrounding Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. One such…

In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle put his beloved detective, Sherlock Holmes, to rest with the publication of “The Final Problem” in the Strand. This resulted in an outpouring of emotion from outraged fans who were not ready to let the detective go. Also…

In 1881, George Newnes ushered in a wave of “New Journalism” with his founding of the periodical “Tit-Bits from all the Interesting Books, Periodicals, and Newspapers of the World.” His conception was to create a magazine aimed toward an expanding…

Prior to the Copyright Act of 1976, no significant changes had been made to copyright law since 1909. However, with the amount of technological advancements and the proliferation of mediums such as film, television, and radio, it became a necessity…

The next big shift in copymaking began to take shape in the mid twentieth century with electronic photocopiers. Moving away from the highly tactile process of creating a stencil and rolling ink through with the mimeograph, the photocopier combined a…

The precursor to the mimeograph was an 1875 invention by Thomas Edison known as the Electric Pen. The patent for the device was received one year later, covering the electric pen which was used to create a stencil, and the flatbed duplicating press.…

In the late nineteenth century, automated printing processes that sped up the production and output of periodicals allowed for greater circulation of content that could reach a wider audience. The magazine, and specifically New Journalism practices,…

In the early nineteenth century, printing continued to be conducted by handpress, with an output that remained virtually unchanged for the last four hundred years. Magazine production often found multiple handpressed working simultaneously to produce…