This semester I worked with Em Carline to explore the reasons people collect. We chose to work together because while we had different focus areas, we were both intrigued by the topic of collecting. Because I am a massive collector and have been collecting fan merchandise for years, I was interested in exploring the reasons why fans collect, as well as gain a deeper insight into collecting culture as a whole. On the other hand, Em was intrigued by the idea of personal collections kept for sentimental reasons.
We posted several polls on Twitter to see if there was any interest in our project, working on the questions together and posting those relevant to our specific topic areas. The benefit of this meant that our concept was exposed to a range of our peers because we follow different accounts, it was also easier to keep on track of when to post the polls. Working in a group was also particularly helpful when it came to accountability because we couldn’t slack off as much when someone else is monitoring your work.
After discovering that collecting habits was a viable area of study, we worked to create a timeline for the project and some risk guidelines. This timeline helped indicate when we needed to meet up to assess the results of the survey and work on the later parts of the project. We had some issues keeping on top of our final schedule due to personal issues, meaning that the project was delayed quite severely. There was an unexpected change in circumstances that meant we were unable to meet up in person as we had intended, and it was difficult to organise online meeting times. I feel that if we had better prepared and aimed to have some of the work done beforehand the project would’ve gone better so in the future, I’ll be more open to having different options for meetups and alternative times/places for if anything major occurs.
In terms of my final conclusions and opinion piece, it wasn’t until doing working on the final project that I realised I would have rather included a few more niche questions on collecting in the survey – however, we had tried to balance general questions with specific to not make the survey to long.
Overall, there was a range of positives and negatives to the project. I think working with someone else was very motivational and rewarding as we could hype each other up and share our excitement we could also share the workload more and have a second pair of eyes to double-check everything. On the other hand, it made time management more difficult as we had different schedules and ended up having some major issues arise.
Header from tenor
runaway towards the clouds with me 