Archive of Our Own
| A stylized red logo consisting of three lines: a V, an O, and a sideways V that resolves on its right end as a 3 | |
| <templatestyles src="Template:Hidden begin/styles.css"/>
Screenshot
|
|
| Web address | archiveofourown |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | No |
|
Type of site
|
Fanfiction |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | about 1,372,000 |
| Written in | ruby |
| Owner | Organization for Transformative Works |
| Launched | November 15, 2009 (Open beta) |
|
Alexa rank
|
 #1678 (Global 01/2018) |
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 2018, Archive of Our Own hosted over 3.7 million works in over 27,800 fandoms. The site has received positive reception for its curation, its organization, and the design of the site, mostly done by readers and writers of fanfiction.
Contents
History and operations
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, ultimately leading 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]
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]
Archive of Our Own runs on open source code programmed almost exclusively by volunteers in the Ruby on Rails web framework. The developers of the site allow users to submit requests for features on the site via a Trello board.[1]
Features
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.[5] 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.[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 ("Major Character Death", "Graphic Depictions of Violence", "Underage", and "Rape/Non-Con").[5] 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] Readers can give stories kudos, which function similarly to likes on other sites.[6] 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
Archive of Our Own reached one million fanworks (including stories, artpieces, 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.[7] 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.[8]
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.[5] 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"[6] that consists of the words "I am Groot" and no others.[9][10]
Reception
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.[11] 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".[12] 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
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
Further reading
- Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- 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)
