Fanfiction as Data: Exploring Interpretive Communities through Network Analysis

Anastasia Glawion, FAU, Erlangen-Nürnberg

Fanfiction offers a compelling case for digital literary studies: the texts are born-digital, readily accessible, metadata-rich and potentially subversive. While fan studies scholars have emphasized the participatory and community-driven nature of fanfiction from the beginning, this dimension has yet to be fully integrated into computational literary studies. In the talk, I propose network analysis to prestructure fanfiction data from the platform Fanfiktion.de. This enables to focus further explorations on platform-based interpretive communities, allowing to trace literary meaning-making from within. In addition, I will discuss fan-oriented strategies of data collection that respect the participatory ethos of the field.