Digital Literacies Project: The Autobiography of Jane Eyre

This semester, I plan to direct my Digital Literacies attention toward a YouTube series called The Autobiography of Jane Eyre; it is a modern day adaptation of (you guessed it) Jane Eyre, in which the story is told in the format of a video blog. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre's format was inspired by last year's very successful video blog adaptation of Pride and Prejudice entitled The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. New episodes of TAoJE are posted twice a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays), and are usually between 2 and 5 minutes long. The series currently has 26 episodes, and is approximately 40% into the original novel's storyline.

Jane is a girl after my own heart. (Source)

The Autobiography of Jane Eyre follows The Lizzie Bennet Diaries' tradition of incorporating various forms of social media in its storytelling; Jane's updates to Twitter and Tumblr expand upon the events that take place in the YouTube episodes. (Some of the other characters also have Twitters, websites, etc.) Being digitally literate -- more specifically, literate in social media -- is fundamentally tied to the way the story presents itself. TAoJE uses social media to conjure a far-reaching verisimilitude for its audience. I'm extremely curious to examine just how that audience responds to this story as it progresses.

Rather than taking on the formidable task of tracking TAoJE's presence across the entire internet, I have selected one particular site that has an active TAoJE fanbase community: Tumblr. (The YouTube comments are another interesting site to consider, but Tumblr's posting format lends itself much more easily to lengthy discussion.) Tumblr serves as a home base of sorts for many fandoms; if any significant events happen within a fandom, it's usually on Tumblr almost immediately afterward. Therefore, it seems like the best space to track in order to keep up to date with the TAoJE fan community's interaction.

Since I am an ardent Jane Eyre fan and scholar, I'm really interested in tracking and analyzing the choices TAoJE makes in its adaptation, and would like to share those thoughts with others in the community -- either through Tumblr posts or posts to my personal blog that I link on Tumblr. (I have yet to decide which, and may try both.) I also want to participate in the conversations that fellow viewers are having. Some viewers are very familiar with Bronte's novel, whereas there are others who don't know the plot of the novel and are going into the series "blind", so there's a very interesting range of voices within the community.

Though I am very active on Tumblr in general, I'm new to this particular fandom, which active but still a bit small. There are perhaps two dozen participants on Tumblr's relevant tags, none of whom I'm previously acquainted with. I imagine that, like the majority of fandom-based Tumblr users, the majority of the participants are female and in the teenage-30s age group, though of course it can't necessarily be determined from their posts.

Since there is no Tumblr blog devoted to The Autobiography of Jane Eyre fandom, at this point in time I am going to be tracking the tags 'the autobiography of jane eyre', 'autobiography of jane eyre', 'aoje', and 'taoje.' If keeping an eye on all of those tags gets too exasperating, I might start a fandom blog devoted to the series myself, so that there's one specific area where all the meta (fandom's common term for textual analysis) and fanworks can be collected.

I'm very much looking forward to exploring The Autobiography of Jane Eyre and its Tumblr fandom this semester. I love witnessing Jane Eyre come to life in a new form that takes modern culture and technologies into account. I really enjoyed the many months I spent watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, even though that series ultimately made some adaptation decisions that soured it for me; in a way, I feel like The Autobiography of Jane Eyre has a better head on its shoulders, though the production values are lower. I'm curious to see if I'll be proven right. Overall, I really look forward to seeing how the series adapts the plot to modern day while staying true to the spirit of Bronte's novel, and how it is received by the internet fandom that it's so intricately entwined with.