Writing a New Text: The Role of Cyberculture in Fanfiction Writers’ Transition to “Legitimate” Publishing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The debate about the monetization of fanfiction and what that might mean for fan writers and systems of publication has been carried out in the blogosphere and among scholars. The publication of the 50 Shades of Grey series (2011–12), and licensed fanfiction on Amazon.com’s Kindle Worlds, however, makes the question of fanfiction publishing largely irrelevant: the monetization of fanfiction is here, regardless of the naysayers. In this article, we move beyond whether or not fanfiction should be circulated in a gift economy or published for profit to examine, through interviews with authors who have “pulled to publish,” the continuum between fandom and traditional publishing. We find that cybercultural fandom provides important benefits for women writers. Although some of the authors who contributed to this study still define authorship as something other than fanfiction, the competing discursive tension in their responses to questions about authorial legitimacy indicates that although the idea of the author may be bound by extant ideology, the author herself is hardly fixed. The fluidity of the respondents’ thinking around authorship is reminiscent of the opportunities offered by the liminal space of the Internet that nurtured their careers. Indeed, the birth of these “legitimate” authors from online spaces is a physical manifestation of Donna Haraway’s cyborg identity moving from a space it requires to exist initially, because of gendered pressures in the “real world,” to actualization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it