Dr Jim's Adventures in Fandom

I’m Dr Jim and I’m a fan.

I was born just after World War II, and one of my earliest memories is watching a few minutes of “The Life of Riley” on that mesmerizing new device called television. Jackie Gleason was in the starring role. The year was 1949 and I was hooked.

Shortly after I learned to read, I started collecting comic books: Superman, Batman, Action Comics, Mystery in Space, even Donald Duck. If I had that collection today I could retire a millionaire, but my mother, like most adults at the time, thought of my priceless collection as trash that collected dust and took up space. So, each year I was forced to surrender my precious babies to my cousins to read, after which they would be tossed out or burned in the fireplace.

Just before the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, I also discovered my first adult science fiction novel and fell in love with the works of Robert Heinlein. In quick succession I discovered Azimov, Clark, Bradbury, and a host of others. Again, I was hooked. Thus it was for-ordained that I would become a Trek fan, and later a Star Wars fan.

I fell in love again in the late 1970s when I discovered my first personal computer (Altair, IMSI) and my first video games (Pong, Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids, and even Pacman).

All of this, however, was just the tip of the iceberg.

By 1979 I was no longer just a fan. I received my doctorate from Binghamton University and joined the army of scientists who were studying Pop Culture.

I loved going to fan events of all kinds. Sci fi cons, highland games, refairs, antique car shows…. For a while I even had the goal of spending my retirement traveling from fan event to fan event. The problem with my idea was that in order to go to all these events I had to know they existed, where and when they were being held, how much it would cost to get in, and the like.

The web is a good resource for finding events, but it has some serious limitations. The majority of fan event sites are dedicated to a single event. There are, or have been, a few sites that listed some fan events of a single kind. But they all suffered from one or more of the same drawbacks. Either they were woefully incomplete, or they had lots of entries but with no order to them, or they were not being kept up-to-date. The most frustrating example of this was a resource site (I won’t name it) that had an extensive database of retail outlets where one could find fan products. The problem was that the entries were listed alphabetically by the name of the retail outlets. The only way for someone to actually find a retail outlet that sold the product they were looking for was to search through the entire database entry by entry.

Creating Fandom was made to address this deficiency.

Our idea is to list as many fan events as possible, of all kinds, and to keep the listing up to date. But for such a database to be usable, it must have some way to search through the fan events and bring up only those kinds of entries a user is specifically looking for.

We needed a way to categorize fan events. We started by looking at the different things that have fans. For convenience, we refer to each of these as a fandom. Most of these fandoms are too small to have events. For example, to the best of my knowledge at the time I write this, the Gertrude Hoffman fan club has only two members. Every time they get together it could be called a Gertrude Hoffman Con. Even though such “events” might be open to the public, we won’t list them. It would be a waste of our limited resources to do so.

The universe of all fandoms is much larger than the universe of all fan events, and it has a much different shape. We took a look at which fandoms have events, and came up with a set of categories which we call “bundles.” All of the kinds of fandom in a bundle share important properties. The first bundle, for example, is composed of fiction genre that existed before the development of electronic media. It is subdivided into divisions that we call “fandoms” which include science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror, among others. Sci fi cons would fall under this bundle, as would horror cons, and mystery cons.

We wanted our site to be user friendly, so we came up with a search engine that guides users to choose a bundle, then a fandom, and then provide a state and a date range. In the near future we’re going to add alternate ways to search the database so that it will be more useful.

Right from the start we decided that we would not charge for this service. We’re fans and this site was created for fans. Besides, we can cover our expenses through selling advertising, and we can make this a truly great fan site by making this truly a fan site. If you’d like to help, please use the contact page to let us know. Let’s make this the place to find out about all fan events.