Fandom, Folksonomies and Creativity - The case of the Archive of Our Own

Aug 21, 2026

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Over recent years Web 2.0 has put information tools into public hands, enabling non-professionals to perform sophisticated information work for leisure and pleasure. The paper examines Archive of Our Own (AO3), an online fanfiction repository, and analyzes how media fans use new technologies to build a “curated folksonomy”. Tag analysis and interviews show how freeform tagging is preserved while a granular taxonomy is maintained for accurate indexing and community benefit through democratic classification labour.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages31

Reading Time1 h 18 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

1. Introduction

1.1 Tagging on AO3

City Research Online City St George’s, University of London Citation: Price, L. (2019) . Fandom, Folksonomies and Creativity: the case of the Archive of Our Own. In: The Human Position in an Artificial World: Creativity, Ethics and AI in Knowledge Organization. (pp. 11-37) . Germany: Ergon Verlag. ISBN 9783956505508 doi: 10.5771/9783956505508-11 This is the accepted version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. To cite this item please consult the publisher's version. Permanent repository link: [https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/25151/](https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/25151/) Link to published version: [https://doi.org/10.5771/9783956505508-11](https://doi.org/10.5771/9783956505508-11) [Copyright and Reuse:](Copyright and Reuse: Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author)[ Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author](Copyright and Reuse: Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author)([s](s)) and/or copyright holders. Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, unless otherwise indicated, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. For full details of reuse please refer to City Research Online policy. City Research Online: [http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/](http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@citystgeorges.ac.uk)[ ](http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@citystgeorges.ac.uk)[ publications@citystgeorges.ac.uk](http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@citystgeorges.ac.uk) Fandom, Folksonomies and Creativity: the case of the Archive of Our Own Ludi Price, City, University of London Abstract Over recent years Web 2.0 has brought information into the hands of the public, and we are increasingly seeing non-professionals doing sophisticated information tasks not merely for work, research or personal interest, but also for leisure – and even pleasure. This paper looks at an online fanfiction repository, Archive of Our Own (AO3), and investigates the ways that media fans have co-opted new technologies to build a ‘curated folksonomy’(Bullard 2014), in order to organise the fanworks (fan-created creative works) uploaded by fans to the website. Run by volunteers, the site is a fascinating example of how passion, and even obsession, can bring amateur knowledge workers together collaboratively with users to build an intricate ‘democratic indexing’ system (Hidderley and Rafferty 1997; Rafferty and Hidderley 2007). Through methods of tag analysis and interviews, the paper explores how Archive of Our Own’s curated folksonomy allows fans to make full and creative use of their own original, freeform tags, while also building a highly granular and sophisticated taxonomy which, though highly labour-intensive to maintain, serves the community by maintaining a high degree of accuracy while also preserving the folksonomic properties of freeform tagging. As well as building a functioning taxonomy, through standardising its nomenclature, and facilitating the discoverability of AO3’s collections to its users, these amateur knowledge workers see their domain expertise and knowledge organisation labour as a type of fanwork that ‘gives back to the community’, in lieu of other creative works such as fanfiction and fanart. 1. Introduction Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a fanfiction archive which was developed and is run by fans, for fans – in this case, fans can be defined as followers of media franchises, products or series, such as seen in books, movies, TV, videogames, comics, and so on. AO3 is run by the non-profit Organization for Transformative Works and is maintained wholly by volunteers and donations. The entire archive was recently nominated for a Hugo Award in the Related Works category (Cole 2

FAQs

What is the central focus of the paper?

The paper studies how AO3’s fan community uses a “curated folksonomy” to organize fanworks through tagging and classification.

How does AO3’s curated folksonomy work in practice?

Volunteers called “tag wranglers” filter and standardize user tags by associating them with established synonyms, enabling efficient retrieval while keeping freeform properties.

What methods does the paper use to investigate AO3?

It uses tag analysis and supplementary interviews with tag wranglers to examine how the taxonomy is maintained and how indexing supports the community.

Aug 21, 2026

Upload by James