[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-135257-en":3,"doc-seo-135257-105":30,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":92},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":27,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":28,"read_time":29},135257,5909887256941,"Mason","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_9964176cb1d06d4a9deccf72a44ae3dc",8,"Research & Report","Cultural Accumulation and Improvement in Online Fan Fiction","We analyze Harry Potter fan fiction hosted on Archive of Our Own (AO3) through the lens of cultural evolution, emphasizing cumulative cultural evolution where cultural systems improve over time by building on earlier innovations. The study examines accumulation and improvement: fan fiction stories accumulate cultural traits over time, both globally and within individual stories, and newer stories receive higher reader liking than earlier ones. The results support combining cultural evolution theory with digital literary studies and motivate work on online media effects on cultural cumulation.","Cultural Accumulation and Improvement in Online Fan Fiction  \nFederico Pianzola a,b , Alberto Acerbic and Simone Reborad, e  \na University of Milan-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy bSogang University, 35 Baekbeom-ro, Daeheung-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, South Korea c Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom  \nd University of Verona, Lungadige Porta Vittoria 41, 37129 Verona, Italy e University of Basel, Petersplatz 1, 4051 Basel, Switzerland  \nAbstract  \nWe analyse stories in Harry Potter fan fiction published on Archive of Our Own (AO3), using concepts from cultural evolution. In particular, we focus on cumulative cultural evolution, that is, the idea that cultural systems improve with time, drawing on previous innovations. In this study we examine two features of cumulative culture: accumulation and improvement. First, we show that stories in Harry Potter’s fan fiction accumulate cultural traits—unique tags, in our analysis—through time, both globally and at the level of single stories. Second, more recent stories are also liked more by readers than earlier stories. Our research illustrates the potential of the combination of cultural evolution theory and digital literary studies, and it paves the way for the study of the effects of online digital media on cultural cumulation.  \nKeywords  \ncultural evolution, cumulative culture, Harry Potter, digital literary studies, fan fiction, literature  \n1. Introduction  \nIn many cultural domains we can observe a progress through cumulative improvements. Theefficiency of information storage, just to take a familiar example, increased through centuries with a series of innovations, in a process that continues today: a contemporary smartphone can store thousands of books. In cultural evolution theory this process is broadly described as cumulative cultural evolution [9, 11] .  \nThere are no universally agreed measures of cumulation [11], but it seems a sensible assumption that its degree differs in different cultural domains. In some domains, such as technology, we can observe clear marks of accumulation, while in others, such as arts, even if accumulation is not absent [19, 16], its scope appears limited. Many factors could explain why the degree of accumulation differs as such, but two are particularly interesting for cultural evolution. One is availability, that is, the number of possible models or cultural traits one has at disposal. While the exact details are debated [8, 20], the basic idea is that more versions of the same item available to copy from increase the probability that the item will be successfully preserved. The second is fidelity. Cultural transmission is a noisy process. Transmission chain  \nCHR 2020: Workshop on Computational Humanities Research, November 18 –20, 2020, Amsterdam, The Netherlands  \n£ [federico.pianzola@unimib.it](federico.pianzola@unimib.it) (F. Pianzola); [alberto.acerbi@brunel.ac.uk](alberto.acerbi@brunel.ac.uk) (A. Acerbi); [simone.rebora@univr.it](simone.rebora@univr.it)  \n(S. Rebora)  \nDZ 0000-0001-6634-121X (F. Pianzola); 0000-0001-5827-8003 (A. Acerbi); 0000-0002-1501-3774 (S. Rebora)  \n© 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors.  \nUse permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) . CEUR Workshop Proceedings ([CEUR-WS.org](CEUR-WS.org))  \nexperiments show that information transmitted orally tend to be lost and transformed [18] . In some cases, populations of individuals converge on similar cultural traits without the need of accurate passage of information, because of various constraints [5, 13] . In other cases, however, information needs to be preserved and successfully transmitted to allow the reproduction of a cultural trait [2]: modern complex technologies are preserved by virtue of supports that allows faithful transmission.  \nThe contemporary diffusion of online digital media produces an increase of availability and fidelity in several domains [1] . A pertinent q","cbCaidCfM106J4NW","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaidCfM106J4NW","pdf",419999,1,10,"English","en",105,"# Introduction\n## Cultural cumulation in cultural domains\n## Availability and fidelity in cultural evolution\n## Online digital media and implications\n## Fan fiction analysis in AO3\n## Features of cumulative culture: accumulation and improvement","[{\"question\":\"What is the main focus of the analysis in this paper?\",\"answer\":\"The paper studies Harry Potter fan fiction on AO3 using cultural evolution concepts, especially cumulative cultural evolution, and focuses on accumulation and improvement.\"},{\"question\":\"How do the authors measure accumulation in fan fiction?\",\"answer\":\"Accumulation is modeled as an increase over time in the number of cultural traits, operationalized via unique tags, observed both globally and within individual stories.\"},{\"question\":\"What relationship is found between story recency and reader engagement?\",\"answer\":\"More recent stories receive more liking from readers than earlier stories, linking improvement to temporal progression in the dataset.\"}]","Cultural Accumulation and Improvement in Online Fan Fiction | 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