Fanfiction Folksonomy Case Study

Our Flag Means Death on Archive of Our Own

This project investigates folksonomy development over time by recording freeform tags applied to fanfictions on Archive of Our Own (AO3). It begins by scraping AO3 search results, pulling story (‘fic’) title, author, date of update, and all freeform tags. That data is then exported as JSON, where the next program determines the total number of stories scraped, total number of tags scraped, total number of tags that are used more than twice, and the top ten tags used. The tag data is grouped by week of update, exported to JSON, where the final program pulls the top five tags used for each week.

Of the data pulled from the initial 14,513 fics and 161,871 tags, 4,410 tags showed repeated use. The weeks with the most tags were 4/13/22-4/20/22 with 415 and 9/28/22-10/5/22 with 381. The former is likely to have been a spike due to garnering momentum the series gained soon after the final episode of season 1 aired on 3/24/22 (the top tags for this week were 'Fluff', 109, 'Angst', 94, 'Hurt/Comfort', 87, ‘Post-Canon', 74, 'Post-Season/Series 01', 55) and the latter due to it being the first week of the yearly writing prompt popular on AO3 “Kinktober” (the top five tags for that week were Anal Sex', 76, 'Alternate Universe - Modern Setting', 63, 'OFMD Kinktober', 63, 'Fluff', 60, 'Kinktober 2022', 54).

Many of the most-used tags are sexually explicit in nature, which is unsurprising due to the mature rating and romantic nature of the show. It is of note that 'Alternate Universe - Modern Setting' first appeared as a top five tag in the week of 6/29/22 and has remained almost every week since then. While the show was renewed for a second season earlier that month, there is no obvious catalyst for this tag. Further contextual research is necessary.

Total Quantity of Fics

14,513

Total Quantity of Tags

161,871

 Total Quantity of Tags That Appear More Than Twice

4,410

Top 10 Tags:

1. 'Fluff'—2,307

2. 'Hurt/Comfort'—1,667

3. 'Angst'—1,585

4. 'Alternate Universe - Modern Setting'—1504

5. 'Anal Sex'—1,410

6. 'Post-Canon'—1,184

7. 'Blackbeard | Edward Teach Loves Stede Bonnet'—1,143

8. 'Stede Bonnet Loves Blackbeard | Edward Teach'—1,020

9. 'Established Relationship'—985

10. 'Canon-Typical Violence'—916