Nothing Makes My Day like Success with Social Proof

I wrote Lynne McNeill, the folklore professor at USU that Dr. Eliason suggested to me as a good person to contact about Digital Folklore, last night and she responded this morning! She was amazingly helpful! It has totally renewed my interest in and excitement for my subject, which was flagging after my muse and inspiration left me to myself last night while trying to rewrite my submission.

I told her the direction I am heading in (to advocate the remix culture of the internet being the perfect venue for both the dissemination of existing traditions/lore and the creation of new genres of folklore and thus requiring more attention from folkloristics) and she confirmed that I'm heading in the right directions, saying: "Right now, your question of remixing is a good one--not only are traditional forms of folklore being revived on the Internet, but new forms, like image macros and memes, and coming to prevalence.  There's not much general writing about it all yet--lots of conference papers and lots of individual case studies as articles and book chapters, but no prevailing work on it other that Trevor's book."

I asked her to point me in the right direction as far as sources for my research of folklore on the internet and methodology for studying Internet folklore, and told her what sources I had already found. She confirmed that I had "found many of the main resources out there" and gave me additional direction. She not only recommended a book and certain articles, but also attached PDF copies of those articles to the email! Talk about helpful! (and of course, I sent her a huge thank you email right back).


The sources she recommended will help me have a really solid background knowledge of the conversation currently revolving around Digital Folklore, which is important to the people running the AFS conference, as well as providing me with more authors to contact and test my ideas with - yay for information being connected to people.

The sources she recommended were: 

a book - Newslore: Contemporary Folklore on the Internet by Russell Frank which came out in April of last year (just a year ago).

"There's some early work in folklore studies that might be of interest: John Dorst's "Folklore in the Teletronic Age" (or something like that), and Rob Howard's "Electronic Hybridity".  I'll attach both of them to this email--even if they're not terribly relevant to your work, AFS always appreciates it when people are aware of the early work that folklorists have done." By early, she means 1990 and 2008.

She also attached an article by Monica Foote at University of California, Berkley entitled "Userpicks: Cyber Folkart in the 21st Century published in Folklore Forum 37.1 in 2007.

She also let me know that there's a second book to Folklore and the Internet coming out this fall entitled Folk Culture in the Digital Age. Can't wait to read it!

Thank you Dr. McNeill! and thank you Dr. Eliason for recommending her as a contact! I feel like such a lucky duck!