Work

From fandoms to heritage. Understanding fanfiction forums as Digital Heritage Communities

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: Should fanfiction forums be considered an instance of Digital Heritage Communities? Departing from the mainstream approach according to which Heritage Communities relate to intangible goods or material collections of Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs), we rather focus on the creative and cultural participatory assets enhanced by the advent of digital media (such as fanfictions) and the online communities (resp., fandoms) that support them. Here, we study by means of computational techniques the case of the Archive of Our Own (AO3), an Internet forum created and managed by fanfiction writers willing to share their work with a global fandom community. We find that AO3 cultivates a prosocial relational atmosphere that favors the emergence of stable sub-communities committed to writing, reading and enriching fanfictions as a shared cultural resource (a commons). Such features align with those outlined as characteristic of Heritage Communities, while emerging around a yet undervalued form of ‘born-digital’ cultural assets.

Source: Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

DOI: 10.1177/13548565241302245

Authors: Federico Pilati, Maria Tartari, Antoine Houssard, Pier Luigi Sacco

Institutions: University of Geneva, University of Milano-Bicocca, University of Bologna, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Chieti-Pescara

Language: English

Topic: Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: European Commission, H2020 Society

Awards: Measuring the impact of DIgital CulturE, Measuring the impact of DIgital CulturE