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An Archive of Our Own Beginning Again

Nonprofit repository for fanfiction

Archive of Our Ain
A stylized red logo consisting of three lines: a V, an O, and a sideways V that resolves on its right end as a 3

Screenshot

Archive of Our Own's homepage.

Blazon of site

Fanfiction
Founded September 2008; 13 years ago  (2008-09)
Possessor Organization for Transformative Works
URL archiveofourown.org
Commercial No
Registration Optional
Users 4,031,000
Launched November 14, 2009 (2009-11-fourteen) (Open beta)
Written in Reddish

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction (fics) and other fanworks contributed by users. The site was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works and went into open beta in 2009.[1] Equally of December 2020[update], Archive of Our Own hosted 7 million works[2] in over 40,000 fandoms.[iii] The site has received positive reception for its curation, organization and design, by and large done past readers and writers of fanfiction.[4] [5]

Archive of Our Ain won the Hugo Award for All-time Related Work in 2019.[half-dozen]

History and operations [edit]

In 2007, a site called FanLib was created with the goal of monetizing fanfiction. Fanfiction was authored primarily by women, and FanLib, which was run entirely by men, drew criticism. This ultimately led to the creation of the nonprofit System for Transformative Works (OTW) which sought to record and archive fan cultures and works.[four] OTW created Archive of Our Own (abbreviated AO3) in October 2008 and established it equally an open up beta on November xiv, 2009.[7] [8] [ix] The site'southward name was derived from a blog mail by the writer Naomi Novik who, responding to FanLib's lack of interest in fostering a fannish customs, called for the creation of "An Archive of One'south Own."[four] The name is inspired by the essay A Room of Ane'southward Own by Virginia Woolf, in which Woolf said that a author needed infinite, time, and resources in lodge to create.[10] [11] AO3 defines itself primarily as an archive and not an online customs.[11]

By 2013, the site'southward annual expenses were most $70,000. Fic authors from the site held an auction via Tumblr that year to raise money for Archive of Our Ain, bringing in $sixteen,729 with commissions for original works from bidders.[seven] In 2018, the site'southward expenses were budgeted at approximately $260,000.[12]

Archive of Our Own runs on open source lawmaking programmed about exclusively past volunteers in the Ruby on Rail web framework. The developers of the site let users to submit requests for features on the site via a Jira dash board.[4] AO3 has approximately 700 volunteers,[x] who assist the organization by working on volunteer committees. Each of these committees, which include AO3 Documentation, Communications, Policy & Abuse, and Tag Wrangling, manages a office of the site.

Features [edit]

Hybrid tagging wrangling arrangement [edit]

Stories on Annal of Our Own can be sorted into categories and tagged based on elements of the stories, including characters and ships involved and other more specific tags.[13] Approximately 300 volunteers chosen "tag wranglers" manually connect synonymous tags to bolster the site's search system, assuasive it to empathise "mermaids", "mermen", and "merfolk" as constituents of the "merpeople" tag, for example.[fourteen] [x] [4]

Content ratings [edit]

Archive of Our Own allows users to charge per unit their stories by intended reader age ("General audience", "Teen and up audiences", "Mature", and "Explicit"), by grapheme human relationship(south), and by the sexual orientation(southward) and pairings of featured characters ("F/F", "M/M", "F/K", "Multi", "Other", and "Gen"). The archive likewise asks writers to supply content warnings that might apply to their works (e.g., "Major Grapheme Decease", "Graphic Depictions of Violence", "Underage", and "Rape/Non-Con").[13]

Archive of Our Own allows writers to publish whatever content, and so long equally information technology is legal. This assart was developed as a reaction to the policies of other popular fanfiction hosts such as LiveJournal, which at ane time began deleting the accounts of fic writers who wrote what the site considered to exist pornography, and FanFiction.Net, which disallows numerous types of stories including whatever that repurpose characters originally created past authors who disapprove of fanfiction.[4] [11]

Reader feedback [edit]

Readers can give stories kudos, which function similarly to likes or hearts on other sites.[15] Readers can also leave comments or make public (and private) bookmarks.[16]

Usernames [edit]

The site does not require users to sign up using their legal names. Instead, users may identify themselves past 1 or more pseudonyms linked to their central account.[4]

Content [edit]

Archive of Our Own reached ane 1000000 fanworks (including stories, art pieces, and podcast fic recordings or podfics) in Feb 2014. At that time, the site hosted works representing fourteen,353 fandoms, the largest of which were the Curiosity Cinematic Universe (MCU), Supernatural, Sherlock, and Harry Potter.[viii] In July 2022 it was announced that the site had two million registered users and v 1000000 posted works.[17] Of the top 100 character pairings written about in fic on the site in 2014, 71 were male/male person slash fiction and the majority of character pairings featured white characters.[18] In 2016, virtually 14% of fic hosted on the site took place in an alternative universe (often shortened to AU) in which characters from a particular canon are transplanted into a dissimilar context.[19]

AO3 maintains a policy of "maximum inclusiveness" and minimal content censorship, which means that they do not dictate what kinds of work can be posted to the archive. This openness has led to the hosting of controversial content including works depicting rape, incest, and pedophilia.[xi] [10] According to AO3 Policy and Abuse Chair Matty Bowers, a modest fraction (1,150) stories submitted to the Archive were flagged by users as "offensive".[xi] Organization for Transformative Works Legal Committee volunteer Stacey Lantagne has stated that: "The OTW'southward mission is to advocate on behalf of transformative works, not just the ones we like."[11]

The length of a story on Annal of Our Own tends to correlate with its popularity. Stories of 1,000 words often received fewer than 150 hits on average while stories that were closer in length to a novel were viewed closer to 1,500 times apiece.[xiii]

Via the OTW'due south Open Doors project, launched in 2012, stories from older and defunct fic archives are imported to Archive of Our Own with an aim to preserving fandom history.[twenty]

Reception [edit]

In 2012 Aja Romano and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of The Daily Dot described Annal of Our Ain as "a cornerstone of the fanfic customs," writing that information technology hosted content that other sites like FanFiction.Net and Wattpad deemed inappropriate and was more easily navigable than Tumblr.[21]

Time listed Archive of Our Ain as one of the 50 best websites of 2013, describing information technology as "the virtually carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web".[5]

According to Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy Due south. Bruckman, Archive of Our Own is a rare example of a value-sensitive blueprint that was adult and coded past its target audience, namely writers and readers of fanfiction. They wrote that the site serves as a realization of feminist HCI (an surface area of homo–computer interaction) in practice, despite the fact that the developers of Annal of Our Own had not been conscious of feminist HCI principles when designing the site.[4]

In 2019, Archive of Our Own was awarded a Hugo Award in the category of Best Related Work, a category whose purpose is to recognize science fiction–related piece of work that is notable for reasons other than fictional text.[22] [23]

Controversy [edit]

On Feb 29, 2020, Archive of Our Own was blocked in mainland China, after fans of Chinese actor Xiao Zhan reported the website for hosting an explicit fan fiction novel with graphic sketches.[24] The banning of the site led to several incidents and controversies online, in the Chinese entertainment manufacture, as well every bit to professional person enterprises, due to heavy backlash from mainland Chinese users of Archive of Our Own.[25] Users chosen for boycott against Xiao Zhan, his fans, endorsed products, luxury brands, and other Chinese celebrities involved with the actor.[26] [27]

References [edit]

  1. ^ "Announcing Open up Beta!".
  2. ^ "The Archive of Our Own Reaches Seven One thousand thousand Fanworks! – Arrangement for Transformative Works". Retrieved 2021-01-10 .
  3. ^ "Celebrating forty,000 Fandoms on the AO3 – Organization for Transformative Works". Retrieved 2020-12-05 .
  4. ^ a b c d eastward f k h Fiesler, Casey; Morrison, Shannon; Bruckman, Amy S. (2016). An Annal of Their Ain: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design. CHI 2016. San Jose, CA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 2574–2585. doi:x.1145/2858036.2858409. ISBN978-1-4503-3362-7. closed access
  5. ^ a b Grossman, Lev (May 1, 2013). "Archive of Our Own". Time. Archived from the original on March thirteen, 2016. Retrieved September xix, 2016.
  6. ^ "2019 Hugo Accolade & 1944 Retro Hugo Award Finalists". The Hugo Awards. April 2, 2019.
  7. ^ a b Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (May iii, 2013). "Fans heighten $16,000 in auction to help popular fic archive". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on September 19, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  8. ^ a b Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (Feb 27, 2014). "This is what ane million fanfics looks like". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on Oct 29, 2015. Retrieved September xix, 2016.
  9. ^ Lothian, Alexis (2012). "Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera". International Periodical of Cultural Studies. 16 (6): 541–556. doi:10.1177/1367877912459132. S2CID 145568162. closed access
  10. ^ a b c d Busch, Caitlin (February 12, 2019). "An Archive of Our Own: How AO3 built a nonprofit fanfiction empire and safe haven". SyfyWire. Archived from the original on February 19, 2019. Retrieved February 23, 2019.
  11. ^ a b c d e f Minkel, Elizabeth (November 8, 2018). "Fan fiction site AO3 is dealing with a free speech contend of its own". The Verge. Archived from the original on November 8, 2018.
  12. ^ "OTW Finance: 2022 Budget". Organization for Transformative Works. April xvi, 2018. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  13. ^ a b c Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (July xv, 2013). "Unpacking the unofficial fanfiction census". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on June 27, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  14. ^ McCulloch, Gretchen (June xi, 2019). "Fans Are Ameliorate Than Tech at Organizing Data Online". Wired. Archived from the original on June 11, 2019. Retrieved June 11, 2019.
  15. ^ Jenkins, Henry (2019). "'Fine art Happens non in Isolation, But in Community': The Collective Literacies of Media Fandom". Cultural Science Journal. eleven (1): 78–88. doi:10.5334/csci.125.
  16. ^ "AO3 reaches 2 one thousand thousand registered Users and 5 million posted works".
  17. ^ Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (July 21, 2014). "'Sherlock,' 'Teen Wolf,' 'Supernatural' amongst superlative targets for fanfic writers". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on September nineteen, 2016. Retrieved September xix, 2016.
  18. ^ Romano, Aja (January 30, 2016). "Is it possible to quantify fandom? Here's one statistician who's crunching the numbers". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on September nineteen, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  19. ^ Coker, Catherine (2017). "The margins of print? Fan fiction as book history". Transformative Works and Cultures. 25. doi:10.3983/twc.2017.01053.
  20. ^ Romano, Aja; Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (August 17, 2012). "Where to observe the good fanfiction porn". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on September xix, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  21. ^ Worldcon. "2019 Hugo Results" (PDF) . Retrieved August 20, 2019.
  22. ^ Whitbrook, James (August 20, 2019). "Here Are Your Hugo 2022 Award Winners". Gizmodo.
  23. ^ 陈圣雅, ed. (March 1, 2020). 同人小说平台ao3被举报,肖战深陷抵制风波 [The fanfiction platform ao3 was tip-offed, Xiao Zhan was deeply involved in the cold-shoulder tempest]. ifeng.com (in Chinese). Phoenix New Media. Archived from the original on March one, 2020. Retrieved July fourteen, 2020.
  24. ^ 李湘文 (March 1, 2020). 不爽偶像被寫進同人文…肖戰粉絲「聯手滅掉AO3」用戶怒炸! 工作室道歉了. ETtoday.net (in Chinese). Retrieved July 14, 2020.
  25. ^ 李红笛 (March 11, 2020). 肖战事件:是非曲直如何评说. 检察日报 [Procuratorial Daily] (in Chinese). Beijing: Supreme People's Procuratorate. doi:10.28407/n.cnki.njcrb.2020.000877. Archived from the original on March 11, 2020.
  26. ^ Romano, Aja (1 March 2020). "People's republic of china has censored the Archive of Our Own, one of the internet's largest fanfiction websites". Phonation . Retrieved ane March 2020.

Further reading [edit]

  • De Kosnik, Abigail; El Ghaoui, Laurent; Cuntz-Leng, Vera; Godbehere, Andrew; Horbinski, Andrea; Hutz, Adam; Pastel, Renée; Pham, Vu (2015). "Watching, creating, and archiving: Observations on the quantity and temporality of fannish productivity in online fan fiction archives". Convergence. 21 (1): 145–164. doi:10.1177/1354856514560313. S2CID 460380.
  • Lothian, Alexis (2011). "An annal of one's own: Subcultural creativity and the politics of conservation". Transformative Works and Cultures. 6. doi:10.3983/twc.2011.0267.
  • How has AO3 fandom changed in the by year? (12 August 2016)
  • Kudos, comments, hits, bookmarks, and word count: what's "boilerplate" on AO3? (17 November 2014)
  • 'Archive Of Our Own' Fanfiction Website Is Upward For A Hugo Award NPR All Things Considered (xvi August 2019)

External links [edit]

  • Official website

johnsonraidearan.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own

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