A prologue:

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 “Buffy Studies” is not formally recognized as a distinct study in itself. Nonetheless, effectively describe the (in)famous space it stakes upon academia. In a study by The Atlantic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was found to have more academic scholarship than any other visual pop cultural text in the past 25 years.

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Beyond and Inside the University:

Arguably, fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer have been doing “digital humanities” for two decades. Practices of archival, recovery, preservation – these objectives of postcolonial and feminist scholarship in the digital humanities have been the fixation for online fandoms since the early "populist" internet user days of the 90s. Today, Ao3 and other fanfiction websites are repositories for transformative works. However, these "hubs" of the modern fan are granchildren of early fansites, many of them Buffy "meta"-focused. A lot of “Big Data” of episode scripts, screencaps, broadcast news produced by a single seven-year run series finds its coordination by fan works. Fan works like BuffyWorld have thus been handling “Big Data” right alongside the academy. Buffy University works, irreverently, in a similar vein – straddling the genre lines between fanwork and archive with a dash of bibliography. 
 

Objectives / On “Bibliography” :
The BU aims to inaugurate fans/budding scholars of Buffy the Vampire Slayer into the role of researcher. This requires giving them every context possible. It takes the form of a multi-layered, disciplinarily-organized bibliography. One advantage of organizing Buffy studies this way it to familiarize users with Buffy Studies as a material set of practices. An enumerative bibliography maps how a field is shaped; what interests have Buffy scholars most seen in, i.e. what have they most taken from the show; who is doing the most research; which publishers seemed most experienced as disseminators of this fan-genre of work, etc. In layperson’s terms, it allows the scholar to “sample of the field.” 

In addition to being an augmented archive for Buffy Studies resources, this project also participates as a “recovery” initiative. Part of the BU’s initiatives are to stave off the Buffy Studies’ death by link malfunction. A lot of fan-made literature on the study was lost to the Geocities purge of the early 2000s. This “link-death” is sadly reflective in the remnants of Buffy scholarship even the most active research sites. Although this project is heavily indebted to the Whedon Studies Association, the Slayage Journal of Whedon Studies and the Whedonology: An Academic Whedon Studies Bibliography, these sources contain a lot of “dead links.” The B.U. tries its best to play “necromancer,” rediscovering links to articles and resources where they can be found. In effect, the B.U. tries its best to keep the flows of information in the digital humanities of Buffy academia “alive.”

 

Finally, the BU integrates the marginal and juvenile status ascribed to online activity onto the bibliography. This is to the effect of experimenting with the limits of the bibliographical reference effort. In the margins, I comment upon the limits of bibliography to (1) represent how often specific characters actually appear in the wealth of Buffy Studies and (2) to capture the specific focuses within a discipline. This is a rhizome in development.