A Computational Analysis of the Style and Semiotics of AO3 Communities of Practice

While preexisting studies in digital and fan media have made note of several unique community practices relating to user-created metadata, community textual influence, and the relationship of fans to media canon, these findings have often limited their scopes specifically to that of 'fan' or 'original' work. This unintentionally constructs a dichotomy between fannish and non-fannish digital fiction, potentially implying a clean distinction between the two. Additionally, the common methodologies of studying these community practices tend towards a small-scale, qualitative approach, revealing a gap in the potential applications of computational and quantitative methods in revealing abstract or large-scale findings in this area of study. This thesis is focused specifically on the reality that 'fannishness' and 'originality' operates like the ends of a spectrum of identities that a piece of digital fiction can be attributed to. We employed a sociolinguistic-based framework focused on the role of user-created metadata on Archive of Our Own (AO3) as a way for authors to signal their perception of their work, and through it investigate how different user communities negotiate the fandom identity of different kinds of digital texts, such as original work, RPF, reader-insert fiction, etc. Using data from a corpus of about 18,000 works from the Marvel, K-Pop, and Original Work fandom tags spanning the years 2015-2025, we encoded and clustered the works of the corpus to reveal patterns in the terms used in metadata to identify works, as well as the narrative elements and writing styles employed in the works themselves. Our findings demonstrate the potential of computational methodologies in describing digital fiction communities, and indicate that metadata serves functionalities beyond its intended descriptive use, where it signals perceived belongingness (or lack thereof) of a work and its creator to certain communities on AO3. The practice of identifying a work with certain specific or generalized fandoms, or as an original work, also depends heavily on the relationship certain types of fandoms have to canonicity.