ASIS&T Annual Meeting 2018 904 Visual Presentations Word-building and World-stealing: Taking, Making, and Playing across Fictional and Material Borders Robyn Stobbs University of Alberta, Canada. stobbs@ualberta.ca Arlene Oak University of Alberta, Canada. aoak@ualberta.ca ABSTRACT Information practices and experiences are complex and layered; they can traverse borders between fiction and reality and the material and immaterial. This poster will present a visual representation of an ongoing narrative analysis from a pilot study of information practices involved in creative engagements with fictional worlds. KEYWORDS Fiction, information behaviour, information experience, narrative methods. INTRODUCTION This poster will present emerging narratives from a pilot study of information and making practices related to fictional worlds. Specifically, the pilot study is the beginning of a larger project with the aim to study information practices and experiences of people who make items related to fictional worlds, e.g., art or clothing based on Harry Potter, maps for Dungeons & Dragons, etc. The research questions that frame the study are: 1) How do people experience information as they engage with fictional worlds in their making practices? 2) How do those fictional worlds map onto makers’ actual, material creations and lives? 3) What information is used and represented in these practices, and in what forms? People are situated in their own contexts as they engage with fictional worlds, creating an overlap between the imaginary and the real that is made visible when they make some form of representation of the fictional world. This poster will present the narrative research framework and methods used for the pilot study and the emerging narrative analysis. The research is situated within an interdisciplinary space between library and information studies (LIS) and material culture studies. SITUATING THE RESEARCH The research framework is built on a concern for understanding information experience from the field of LIS combined with theories from material culture studies that consider the importance of objects and environments. Information behaviour has been defined as the ways in which people need, seek, use, and share information (Fisher, Erdelez, & McKechnie, 2005, p. xix); while information experience is a holistic concept that can be approached from various perspectives. It can encompass emo- tional, embodied, and other aspects of information use that go beyond seeking or skills and behaviours (Bruce, Davis, Hughes, Partridge, & Stoodley, 2014, p. 8). Fiction and fandom have been identified as an understudied and emerging area in this realm (Doty & Broussard, 2017; Forcier, 2017; Price & Robinson, 2017). Creative engagements with fictional worlds can be exam- ined with a consideration for their materiality. Materiality is an important concept for framing this research because objects and environments can both shape and be shaped by people; objects can have agency and affect situations (e.g., Ingold, 2012; Latour, 2005). Creative engagements with fictional worlds encompass a variety of information practices that cross and re-cross borders from imaginary worlds to the material worlds where people engage with them. METHODS The poster will demonstrate the emerging narrative analysis from a pilot study designed to collect detailed data with participants to explore the myriad ways that they creatively engage with fictional worlds. The research framework uses perspectives from narrative inquiry (e.g., Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) influenced by material culture studies (e.g., Riello, 2009; Ingold, 2012) to form a holistic view of information experience as situated in material and narrative contexts. Initial object-interviews were conducted with five participants, and further follow-up continues. Small numbers of participants are used in narrative inquiries in order to be able to interact with them over an extended period of time and generate detailed stories of their experience. All of the participants in this pilot study chose to talk about a fictional world they engage with through some form of gaming (tabletop gaming, live action roleplay, or computer gaming). They told many stories of their engagements with fictional worlds, but the focus for this poster is the stories of their information use and the forms it takes across borders between fictional and material realities. In the object interviews, each participant brought in items they have made based on a fictional world of their choosing and/or objects they use to engage with that world. The objects then served as prompts for the interviews as participants explained how they were made and used. Follow-up has included participants sharing character backstories, photographs, game notes, and in one case, observing an evening of gameplay. As aspects of the experiences of participants are written up, they are further negotiated with participants as a way to acknowledge that we are co-creating the stories of their experience. These stories will then be a used for further analysis and engagement with theories of information behavior and experience.