scholarly journals Who writes Harry Potter fan fiction? Passionate detachment, "zooming out," and fan fiction paratexts on AO3

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Duggan
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Demographic Trends ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Wide Scale

Who reads and writes fan fiction—and why—has long been a central concern of fan studies. Indeed, many of the foundational works in the field of fan studies aim to answer this question. These early studies set a paradigm for our understanding of who makes up fan fiction–centered communities nearly thirty years ago; however, it is clear that the paradigm is now outdated. To my knowledge, there are no wide-scale academic studies of how fan fiction authors identify themselves in online profiles, authors' notes, and other self-descriptive texts, although some fans have produced statistics. Rather, our understandings of fan fiction–centered communities instead rest on our own embedded experiences as fans. While our experiences are valuable, recent work has made it clear that focusing solely on our embedded perspectives may exclude a number of voices, experiences, and viewpoints from scholarly work. This article presents the results of a qualitative study that examines how fan fiction authors described themselves in the paratexts of 1,939 Harry Potter fan fiction works posted to Archive of Our Own (AO3)—over 1 percent of the Harry Potter fan fiction posted to AO3 at the time of the study. It aims to indicate demographic trends within the Harry Potter fandom, identify groups of fans who may have been elided from fan studies' core discourse, discuss why who writes fan fiction matters, and uncover future areas of research concern.

scholarly journals Text mining, Hermione Granger, and fan fiction: What's in a name?

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Leigh Rowe ◽  
Tolonda Henderson ◽  
Tianyu Wang
Keyword(s):  
Text Mining ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Specific Reading ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fiction Writers

When fans rewrite characters, how do they engage that character's identity and the social constructions around it? Fan fiction writers resist, replicate, and create oppressive social systems by changing characters between published and fan texts. As such, fan studies scholars have long been interested in how fans construct characters, an interest that has often been paired with readings of race, gender, and sexuality. Digital humanities can help confirm and nuance extant fan studies scholarship around specific characters popular in fan fiction. We used Word2Vec software to mine the text of 450 pieces of fan fiction based on J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. By focusing on the depiction of Hermione Granger in both Rowling's novels and Harry Potter fan fiction, we tested how text mining character names can reveal properties closely tied to a specific character through the relationships between the target name and other characters. Analysis via Word2Vec found that "Hermione" is used grammatically and contextually differently in the books (in which she is most like Harry and Ron) than in our fan fiction corpus (in which she is most like other girls/women). This difference suggests that these fans have a specific reading of Hermione that is communally understood even if Rowling's diction offers a different reading.

scholarly journals Cultural accumulation and improvement in online fan fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Pianzola ◽  
Alberto Acerbi ◽  
Simone Rebora
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Cumulative Culture ◽  
Cultural Systems ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Cumulative Cultural Evolution ◽  
Cultural Evolution Theory ◽  
Digital Literary Studies

We analyse stories in Harry Potter fan fiction published on Archive of Our Own (AO3), using concepts from cultural evolution. In particular, we focus on cumulative cultural evolution, that is, the idea that cultural systems improve with time, drawing on previous innovations. In this study we examine two features of cumulative culture: accumulation and improvement. First, we show that stories in Harry Potter’s fan fiction accumulate cultural traits—unique tags, in our analysis—through time, both globally and at the level of single stories. Second, more recent stories are also liked more by readers than earlier stories. Our research illustrates the potential of the combination of cultural evolution theory and digital literary studies, and it paves the way for the study of the effects of online digital media on cultural cumulation.

Emotional landscapes of reading: fan fiction in the context of contemporary reading practices

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Samutina
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Reading First ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Literary Experience

This article focuses on fan fiction as a literary experience and especially on fan fiction readers’ receptive strategies. Methodologically, its approach is at the intersection of literary theory, theory of popular culture, and qualitative research into practices of communication within online communities. It characterizes fan fiction as a type of contemporary reading and writing. Taking as an example the Russian Harry Potter fan fiction community, the article poses a set of questions about the meanings and contexts of immersive reading and affective reading. The emotional reading of fan fiction communities is put into historical and theoretical context, with reference to researchers who analysed and criticized the dichotomy of rational and affective reading, or ‘enchantment’, in literary culture as one of the symptoms of modernity. The metaphor of ‘emotional landscapes of reading’ is used to theorize the reading strategies of fan fiction readers, and discussed through parallels with phenomenological theories of landscape. Among the ‘assemblage points of reading’ of fan fiction, specific elements are described, such as ‘selective reading’, ‘kink reading’, ‘first encounter with fan fiction texts’ and ‘unpredictability’.

scholarly journals Adding a digital dimension to fan studies methodologies

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne R. Black
Keyword(s):  
Decision Trees ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Computational Methods ◽  
Frequency Analysis ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Digital Narrative ◽  
A Site

Digital fan fiction challenges the sovereignty of the literary object and necessitates a reevaluation of textuality. Fan fiction may be taken as a form of networked digital narrative that exists electronically and shares features with the printed book. With a focus on the paratext as a site of transaction between fan fiction writers and readers, it is possible to attend to a negotiation between work and text. By using computational methods—word frequency analysis, topic modeling, and decision trees—to analyze fan fiction paratexts as they are used on the online fan fiction repository Archive of Our Own, it is possible to reevaluate the fan fiction paratext and the notion of the fan fiction text.

scholarly journals Benefits of quantitative and doctrinal methodological approaches to fan studies research

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Copyright Law ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Berne Convention ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
Fair Dealing ◽  
Empirical Research Methods ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Special Case

This discussion of the main practices of both legal research and fan studies research explores their key differences and similarities to demonstrate that there are important conclusions that can be drawn from the discourse between the two. The methodology of this research into copyright and fan fiction will be used as a case study to demonstrate how well these fields intersect. This research investigates whether transformative works of fan fiction should be covered by the new fair-dealing exception for pastiche within UK copyright law (Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988), similar to parody. To discuss this, my research investigates whether it can be said empirically and doctrinally that fan fiction could be classified as a special case that does not adversely affect the rights holders' interests, as required by Article 13 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and Article 9 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. By adding doctrinal and empirical research methods to fan studies, the argument can be made that fan fiction is not harmful to the underlying work and does not interfere with the copyright holders' normal exploitation of that work, and as such should be permitted as fair dealing.

scholarly journals Theme park as interface to the wizarding (story) world of Harry Potter

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Godwin
Keyword(s):  
Harry Potter ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Theme Park ◽  
Theme Parks ◽  
Material Interfaces ◽  
Fan Practices ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Taste And Smell

Theme parks such as Universal Orlando's Wizarding World of Harry Potter (WWoHP) offer material interfaces that engage multiple senses (touch, taste, and smell, as well as the sight and sound of more conventional narrative forms) to facilitate immersion in imaginary story worlds. They thus offer new aspects of both fan tourism and material fan practices to explore. Both fan studies and current scholarship on theme parks emphasize active participatory conceptions, countering oversimplifications and misrepresentations of both audiences and theme park visitors as passive spectators or consumers. Corporate-created and -controlled theme parks frame and market fan activities to encourage consumption. Yet fans often use merchandise as additional interfaces to participate actively and to facilitate immersion. For example, in WWoHP, interactive wands use technology to create specific physical "spell" effects in specific locations. Both wands and spells act as a synecdoche for the story world's magic, enabling immersion.

scholarly journals Follow the trope: A digital (auto)ethnography for fan studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milena Popova
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Consent ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
Field Site ◽  
Digital Ethnography ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
Theoretical Issues

In this paper I investigate the methodological challenges posed by the intersection of two factors commonly found in some types of fan studies research: studying a community one is already a member of and that community existing in a digital setting. I propose an approach shaped by traditional ethnography, digital ethnography, and autoethnography that is theoretically grounded, takes into account both practical and theoretical issues, and seeks to leverage the strengths of the digital environment and the ethnographer's knowledge of the community they are researching. I pay particular attention to the role and positionality of the ethnographer in this environment, as well as the process of field site construction, which I conceptualize as a journey. To illustrate this follow-the-trope approach in action, I present a case study based on my research on sexual consent in fan fiction.

scholarly journals An analysis of illocutionary acts in a fantasy movie

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-180
Author(s):  
Siti Sarah Fitriani ◽  
Diana Achmad ◽  
Fitria Rasmita
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Illocutionary Acts ◽  
Illocutionary Act ◽  
The World ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

This study aims to find out the types and the most dominant illocutionary acts used by the main character in a fantasy movie, ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secret’. A descriptive qualitative study was done by observing the utterances spoken by the main character in the movie. The spoken utterances were then analysed based on the types of illocutionary acts, namely: representative, directive, commissive, expressive and declarative.  The results of the study showed that out of the five, only four types of illocutionary acts were found in the movie, they are representative, directive, expressive, and commissive. The most frequently illocutionary act used is directive (47.64%), while the least frequently used is commissive (4.19%). The directive forces used by the main character are varied. Directives are used get the hearers to do something, where in the movie, he often used asking and ordering. Meanwhile, declarative is not employed by the main character since performing declarative act needs authorities and status; this act is used to change the world through utterances. But the main character in this movie do not have any certain status or authority in any position at the magic school he attended, he is a student, still new with the magic world and do not have much power. This is why declarative was not found in the utterances of the main character.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document