Brevity is the Soul of Fic Microfiction, Microfic, and Shakespearean Abridgement in Online Fan Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through a focus on Shakespeare fan fiction, this article discusses ‘microfic’ – short-form fan fiction – as a unique genre of microfiction. Sometimes consisting of fewer than ten words, microfiction relies on clever twists or epiphanies rather than character or plot development for its effect. Although microfic is equally brief and compact, as a genre of fan fiction, it is always engaged in a sustained dialogue with a fan object such as Shakespeare that serves to import whole plots, characters, and metatextual debates into the text with the mention of a name or place. As such, the brevity of microfic is illusory, as it continually draws on – and contributes to – the fan object and its archive. Unlike microfiction in general, micofic is never self-contained. Through an analysis of numerous Shakespeare microfics available in the Archive of Our Own fan fiction database, this article indicates the extent to which their silences are seldom silent.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".