Hello Sinister Since there's some noise round these parts at the moment, this seemed a good time to pop my head up out of the parapet and (re-)say hi (well, technically I think my out of office did that for me the other day but please let's pretend that terrible mailing list faux pas didn't happen). Ten years ago, when I was a lowly undergrad, I did my dissertation on the way Belle and Sebastian fans and Cliff Richard fans used the internet... some of you may remember, if you were around then. Anyway, I had loads of juicy material but never did anything with it beyond the dissertation, and now I work in the world of academia (in the media department at Sheffield Hallam University), and have the means to use it, so I want to repeat my study ten years on to see what has changed and what has remained for the two fan communities. The aim would be to turn the study into something publishable, using material from the original study alongside new material for comparison. If it gets published I'll find a way of letting you all read it. I would love to interview some of you (via email/IM/phone/Facebook or whatever works best) about your experiences of Sinister and/or the wider B&S fandom over the past decade. There'll probably also be questionnaires for those who don't want to say a lot, but I want to start with interviews as I think they will potentially be the richest source of material. If you are interested please email me (r.a.deller@shu.ac.uk) and I'll send you a consent form and we can chat further. You don't have to have been a member (or a fan) ten years ago, as I am interested in what happened in between as well as how things were in 2000 and how they are in 2010, though if you were around ten years ago, even better! Oh, and I got a first last time around for the piece so, belatedly, thank you all very much! Ruth/Rad x +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+