Archive Of Our Own

Archive Of Our Own 8,5/10 4939 votes

Check and see if ArchiveOfOurOwn (AO3) is not working for everyone at the moment, explore its historical availability and outage data. Welcome to the restricted section of the library! Now the way you interpret this is completely up to you! It could be in the sense of Forbidden love, dark and restricted magic or a romance that blooms in the restricted section of the library!! An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works.

  1. Archive Of Our Own Original Work
  2. Works Archive Of Our Own

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/ArchiveOfOurOwn

Go To

Https://archiveofourown.org/Archive Of Our Own
  • Archive Panic: 12 overall categories, with numerous fandoms in each category, meaning thousands and thousands of stories. Good luck.
  • Broken Base: The arguments over stories containing 'problematic' elements such as 'dub-con', non-con/rape, underage sex, violence and torture, etc., and whether the site's lenient policies and tagging system lets writers create and readers consume these stories in a safe environment, or whether the site and the writers are making light of the subject matter. Critics feel that these stories endanger real people, while writers defend their material under 'free speech' declarations, and supporters argue that the idea of someone's online writings are leading to actual rape and murder is a disingenuous morality crusade equivalent to saying violent movies and video games cause mass shootings (a notion that still hasn't entirely left the minds of some parts of the public). The argument isn't uncommon to online writing sites, but AO3's lenient policies attract these arguments in droves.
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  • Fandom Rivalry: The site has this with Fan Fiction Dot Net due to their differing policies with regards to certain stories. Those pro-AO3 love how there's much more freedom with what they're allowed to write without worrying that it'll be taken down. Those pro-Fanfiction.net often counter that said freedom gives a perfect example of whythose rules are there in the first place.
  • Misaimed Fandom:
    • The tags on AO3 were initially intended for readers to filter works, characters, pairings, and triggers, but it's very common for writers to add humorous, unique tags that apply only to that particular work that do nothing to assist with filters or searches.
    • The original intention of AO3 was to give a place for fics that Fanfiction Dot Net won't allow for one reason or another, such as MST fics, Interactive Fiction fics and so on, without worry that they'll be taken down by mods/trolls abusing a report system. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in the archives becoming overrun with Lemon Fics, giving the place a reputation as 'Adult Fan Fiction Dot Net' (there actually already is a site called AdultFanfiction.Net) or 'e621's literature branch'.note
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Archive of Our Own
Type of site
Fanfiction
FoundedSeptember 2008; 10 years ago
OwnerOrganization for Transformative Works
Websitearchiveofourown.org
Alexa rank#593 (Global, 30 June 2019)
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
Users2,000,000
LaunchedNovember 15, 2009(Open beta)
Written inRuby

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction (fic) 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. As of 2019, Archive of Our Own hosted 5 million works in over 33,000 fandoms. The site has received positive reception for its curation, organization and design, mostly done by readers and writers of fanfiction.

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 Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) which sought to record and archive fan cultures and works.[1] OTW created Archive of Our Own (abbreviated AO3) in October 2008 and established it as an open beta on November 14, 2009.[2][3][4] The site's name was derived from a blog post by the writer Naomi Novik who, responding to FanLib's lack of interest in fostering a fannish community, called for the creation of 'An Archive of One's Own'.[1] The name is inspired by the essay A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf.[5][6] AO3 defines itself primarily as archive and not an online community.[6]

By 2013, the site's annual expenses were about $70,000. Fic authors from the site held an auction via Tumblr that year to raise money for Archive of Our Own, bringing in $16,729 with commissions for original works from bidders.[2] In 2018, the site's expenses were budgeted at ~$260,000.[7]

Archive of Our Own runs on open source code programmed almost exclusively by volunteers in the Ruby on Railsweb framework. The developers of the site allow users to submit requests for features on the site via a Trello board.[1] AO3 has approximately 700 volunteers.[5]

AO3 was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2019.[8]

Features[edit]

Stories on Archive 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.[9] Approximately 300 volunteers called 'tag wranglers' manually connect synonymous tags to bolster the site's search system, allowing it to understand 'mermaids', 'mermen', and 'merfolk' as constituents of the 'merpeople' tag, for example.[10][5][1] Archive of Our Own allows users to rate their stories by intended age ('General audience', 'Teen and up audiences', 'Mature', and 'Explicit'), relationships, orientations and pairings ('F/F', 'M/M', 'F/M', 'Multi', 'Other', and 'Gen'), and to supply content warnings for their works (e.g. 'Major Character Death', 'Graphic Depictions of Violence', 'Underage', and 'Rape/Non-Con').[9] Archive of Our Own allows writers to publish any content, so long as it is legal. This allowance was developed as a reaction to the policies of other popular fanfiction hosts such as LiveJournal, which at one time began deleting the accounts of fic writers who wrote what the site considered to be pornography, and FanFiction.Net, which disallows numerous types of stories including any that repurpose characters originally created by authors who disapprove of fanfiction.[1][6] Readers can give stories kudos, which function similarly to likes on other sites.[11] The site does not require real names from its users, who may identify themselves by one or more pseudonyms linked to their central account.[1]

Content[edit]

Archive Of Our Own Original Work

Archive of Our Own reached one million fanworks (including stories, art pieces, and podcast fic recordings or podfics) in February 2014. At that time, the site hosted works representing 14,353 fandoms, the largest of which were the Marvel universe, Supernatural, Sherlock, and Harry Potter.[3] By 2016, the site hosted over two million fanworks and had almost 750,000 users.[1] Of the top 100 character pairings written about in fic on the site in 2014, 71 were male/male slash fiction and the majority of character pairings featured white characters.[12] In 2016, about 14% of fic hosted on the site took place in an alternative universe in which characters from a particular canon are transplanted into a different context.[13] AO3 maintains a policy of 'maximum inclusiveness' and minimal content censorship, which has led to the hosting of controversial content including works depicting rape, incest, and pedophilia.[6][5] According to AO3 Policy and Abuse Chair Matty Bowers, a small fraction (1,150) stories submitted to the Archive were flagged by users as 'offensive'.[6] Organization for Transformative Works Legal Committee volunteer Stacey Lantagne stated that: 'The OTW’s mission is to advocate on behalf of transformative works, not just the ones we like.'[6]

Works Archive Of Our Own

The length of a story on Archive of Our Own tends to correlate with its popularity. Stories of 1,000 words received less than 150 hits on average while stories that were closer in length to a novel were viewed closer to 1,500 times apiece.[9] As of June 2015, the most popular story on the site was reportedly 'I Am Groot', a 'masterpiece of hardcore Guardians of the Galaxy erotica'[11] that consists of the words 'I am Groot' and no others.[14][15]

Reception[edit]

Aja Romano and Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of The Daily Dot described Archive of Our Own as 'a cornerstone of the fanfic community' by 2012, writing that it hosted content that other sites like FanFiction.Net and Wattpad deemed inappropriate and was more easily navigable than Tumblr.[16]Time listed Archive of Our Own as one of the 50 best websites of 2013, describing it as 'the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web'.[17] According to Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman, Archive of Our Own is a rare example of a value-sensitive design that was developed and coded by its target audience, namely writers and readers of fanfiction. They wrote that the site serves as a realization feminist HCI (an area of human–computer interaction) in practice, despite the fact that the developers of Archive of Our Own had not been conscious of feminist HCI principles when designing the site.[1]

References[edit]

  1. ^ abcdefghFiesler, Casey; Morrison, Shannon; Bruckman, Amy S. (2016). An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design. CHI 2016. San Jose, CA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 2574–2585. doi:10.1145/2858036.2858409. ISBN978-1-4503-3362-7.
  2. ^ abBaker-Whitelaw, Gavia (May 3, 2013). 'Fans raise $16,000 in auction to help popular fic archive'. The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on September 19, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  3. ^ abBaker-Whitelaw, Gavia (February 27, 2014). 'This is what 1 million fanfics looks like'. The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on October 29, 2015. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  4. ^Lothian, Alexis (2012). 'Archival anarchies: Online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera'. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 16 (6): 541–556. doi:10.1177/1367877912459132.
  5. ^ abcdBusch, 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.
  6. ^ abcdefMinkel, Elizabeth (November 8, 2018). 'Fan fiction site AO3 is dealing with a free speech debate of its own'. The Verge. Archived from the original on November 6, 2018.
  7. ^'OTW Finance: 2018 Budget'. Organization for Transformative Works. April 16, 2018. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  8. ^'2019 Hugo Award & 1944 Retro Hugo Award Finalists'. The Hugo Awards. April 2, 2019.
  9. ^ abcBaker-Whitelaw, Gavia (July 15, 2013). 'Unpacking the unofficial fanfiction census'. The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on June 27, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  10. ^McCulloch, Gretchen (June 11, 2019). 'Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online'. Wired. Archived from the original on June 11, 2019.
  11. ^ abTrendacosta, Katharine (June 18, 2015). 'What is the most popular work fanfic on Archive of Our Own?'. io9. Archived from the original on August 29, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  12. ^Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (July 21, 2014). ''Sherlock,' 'Teen Wolf,' 'Supernatural' among top targets for fanfic writers'. The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on September 19, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  13. ^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 19, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  14. ^Hughes, William (August 8, 2014). 'Behold the subtle sensuality of erotic fan-fiction written in the voice of Groot'. The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on October 17, 2014. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  15. ^sherlocksmyth (August 4, 2014). 'I Am Groot'. Archive of Our Own. Archived from the original on October 5, 2015.
  16. ^Romano, Aja; Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (August 17, 2012). 'Where to find the good fanfiction porn'. The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on September 19, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
  17. ^Grossman, Lev (May 1, 2013). 'Archive of Our Own'. Time. Archived from the original on March 13, 2016. Retrieved September 19, 2016.
Archive

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.
  • Lothian, Alexis (2011). 'An archive 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 past year? (12 August 2016)
  • Kudos, comments, hits, bookmarks, and word count: what’s “average” on AO3? (17 November 2014)
  • Is fanfiction mostly porn? Spoilers: No (7 January 2016)

External links[edit]

Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Archive_of_Our_Own&oldid=904091335'