Written by Greetings everyone. I know all of you are busy with final assignments as we head into the holiday. I just wanted to share this and see if anyone had thoughts. ChatGPT upgraded to 5.1 and I saw a post at /professors on reddit about a significant jump in the quality of writing in the LLM. I am the core course coordinator for INFO 200 as many of you know and I have been mulling over what academic writing looks like in the age of AI. I asked the 5.1 to generate a handful of paragraphs and citations in APA seven on the information behaviors and needs of Twin Peaks fans. Here’s what I got and I think it’s rather impressive. I just want to share this and see if anyone had any thoughts or ideas about what the future of academic writing at the graduate level looks like. I have some thoughts myself, but I would love to hear from any of you that have a moment. no worries this is entirely optional.
Prompt: Write three paragraphs about the information behaviors in needs of the Twin Peaks television show fan community and use scholarly citations from peer reviewed articles. Use APA 7.
The Twin Peaks fan community can be understood as an information-intensive cult media fandom whose members’ everyday life information needs center on interpreting a complex narrative universe, tracking new paratexts, and sustaining long-term engagement across decades. Price and Robinson’s (2017) research on fan information behavior demonstrates that cult media fans devote extensive effort to identifying, organizing, and interpreting both canonical and fan-produced materials. This aligns with Savolainen’s (1995) model of everyday life information seeking, in which leisure activities generate ongoing information projects. Studies of Twin Peaks, particularly Bainbridge’s (2010, 2019) analyses, highlight how the franchise’s ambiguity, transmedia expansions, and narrative gaps produce persistent interpretive questions that motivate continuous sense-making and information seeking within the community.
The behaviors that meet these needs are highly collaborative and participatory. Drawing on Jenkins’s (1992, 2006) foundational work, fans function as “textual poachers,” producing new information resources such as timelines, theories, wikis, podcasts, and annotated guides. Price and Robinson (2021) found that participatory fandoms use tagging, curation, and recommendation practices to create shared knowledge infrastructures, effectively acting as informal archivists and subject specialists. In Twin Peaks fan spaces, this is apparent in detailed episode analyses, motif cataloging, cross-referencing of intertexts, and long-running digital archives that document interpretive debates. These practices collectively transform individual viewing into a communal knowledge-building enterprise.
Finally, Twin Peaks fans’ information behaviors address emotional and social needs, including belonging, identity performance, and managing the uncertainty inherent in an opaque and symbolically dense narrative. Studies of online fandom show that information exchange is intertwined with affective support, peer-based expertise, and community identity formation (Booth, 2010; Hills, 2015). Bainbridge (2019) notes that the deliberate ambiguity of Twin Peaks: The Return produces both pleasure and frustration, prompting fans to engage in theorizing, collaborative interpretation, and critique—activities that function as affective information practices. Over more than thirty years, the fandom has migrated across platforms from Usenet to blogs, wikis, and social media, creating a durable “knowledge space” that preserves and extends the cultural memory of Twin Peaks.
References (APA 7)
Bainbridge, J. (2010). “All the World’s a Stage”: Transmedia, fandom and the production of meaning in Twin Peaks.International Journal of Cultural Studies, 13(4), 409–426.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877909350242
Bainbridge, J. (2019). “We’re not going to talk about Judy”: Affective play, ambiguity and resistance in Twin Peaks: The Return. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 16(1), 315–340.
Booth, P. (2010). Digital fandom: New media studies. Peter Lang.
Hills, M. (2015). Fan cultures (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Exploring participatory culture. NYU Press.
Price, L., & Robinson, L. (2017). Exploring the information behavior of cult media fan communities. Journal of Documentation, 73(5), 845–866.
https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-09-2016-0118
Price, L., & Robinson, L. (2021). Information literacy in the wild: Cult media fans’ everyday knowledge practices. Journal of Information Science, 47(3), 393–409.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551518811962
Savolainen, R. (1995). Everyday life information seeking: Approaching information-seeking in the context of “way of life.” Library & Information Science Research, 17(3), 259–294.
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Hi @michael, thanks for sharing.
This is a hot topic across courses and I find myself on the fence. While generative AI can be great for brainstorming, summarizing ideas, and pulling together sources, it often gathers phantom sources. I did a quick search for six of the citations listed above and only one out six exists: Savolainen’s article (which I recognized from INFO200).
Since AI isn’t going away, it will be increasingly important for instructors and librarians to keep up with its advances and uses in academic settings (as well as public and school libraries) in order to help students navigate this complex information landscape and discuss how to best evaluate it for accuracy, bias, and credibility.
@bevinclempson You rock! I must confess that I saw the Price articles and assumed they were the correct citations! Not a good thing and a very strong reminder to always look closely at the citations. It’s interesting how it did not hallucinate the book titles.
@michael I’m not sure how this could happen but I do feel that one of the professional organizations should have a committee monitoring the progress of AI (concentrating on a few of the most popular). With each update they could share some insights and known issues. I did a paper last semester for a reference class and recorded a session where I was able to change the AI’s thinking about bias in a media source. (I presented it with evidence that conflicted with its initial opinion.)
@hharrisbrady that is super interesting. It seems like some of the professional organizations are in the midst of shifts and changes, but I think a working group on AI that could deliver insights quickly to the profession would be incredibly useful.