The politics of the digital transition: lessons from slash fan fiction communities at the turn of the millennium
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
To understand the relationship between gender and the internet in the present, we must return to the transition from print to digital media at the beginning of the enormous social, legal, and economic changes that we are still living within today. Slash fan fiction communities, that is international communities of primarily women organized around the circulation of amateur stories that set existing characters in new same-sex relationships, faced challenges in carving out protected pockets of digital space wherein women’s relationships, creativity, and erotic imaginations could thrive. They were early adopters and adapters of digital technologies, connecting a web of corporate and independent internet infrastructure and tactics to hide slash from the scrutiny of censors yet also make it searchable and findable by potential new readers. These women’s social and narrative experiments on the early internet offer a unique example of stridently independent tech-savvy foremothers whose labor to create livable spaces within the early web are easily made invisible by corporate and male-focused internet histories. The women of slash fan fiction communities serve as a critical reminder of the economically and sexually radical paths offered by the early web and the possibilities for autonomy and independence that may still remain today.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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