Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring

Writers in the Secret Garden

Learning in Large-Scale Environments

Justin Reich and Nichole Pinkard, editors

Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring, Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis, 2019

Writers in the Secret Garden

Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring

Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2019 Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-0-262-53780-3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Dave, Diana, and Ken

For our students, who make coming to work every day a joy

For all the fanfiction authors, who inspire us with their creativity and willingness to share

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Contents

Series Foreword

Foreword

Casey Fiesler

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: The Secret Garden

2 The History of Fanfiction and Mentoring

3 The Theory of Distributed Mentoring

4 Our Ethnographic Work in Fanfiction Communities

5 The Data Science of Fanfiction, Learning, and Writing

6 Conclusion: Beyond Fandom

Appendix

References

Index

Series Foreword

Learning across the life span is more important than ever, and with the wealth of resources and communities available online, there has never been a better time to be a learner. Learners of all ages—in formal and informal settings—are turning to online tools to help them develop new skills and knowledge for work, school, and leisure. The field of large-scale learning engages in the study of networked environments with many, many learners and few experts to guide them.

Large-scale learning environments are incredibly diverse: massive open online courses (MOOCs), intelligent tutoring systems, open learning courseware, learning games, citizen science communities, collaborative programming communities, community tutorial systems, social learning networks, and countless informal communities of learners on platforms such as Reddit, YouTube, and fanfiction sites. These systems either depend upon the direct participation of large numbers of learners in a single instance, or they are enriched by continuous improvement based on analyzing data generated by many learners over time. They share a common purpose—to increase human potential—and a common infrastructure of data and computation to enable learning at scale.

Technologies for large-scale learning are sometimes built deliberately, as in the case of MOOC platforms, and they are sometimes adapted from technologies originally developed for other purposes, as in the case of video-sharing sites. In some cases, they are used by individual learners around the world, and in other cases, large-scale learning environments are embedded within more traditional and small-scale educational systems such as classrooms and schools. They can be used to foster human capacity and create new opportunities, but they can also be used to teach and spread hateful ideologies. With a capacious enough definition of learning, large-scale learning technologies are implicated in nearly every part of the human experience in the networked world, from schooling to professional learning to politics to health care and beyond.

The Learning in Large-Scale Environments series from the MIT Press seeks to investigate, critique, and explain these large-scale environments and the various ways they are hybridized with residential learning space. Just as large-scale learning environments are diverse, our series includes books with a diverse set of methodological and theoretical perspectives, ranging from learning science to computer science to sociocultural research traditions. The series examines large-scale learning environments at multiple levels, including technological underpinnings, policy consequences, social contexts and relationships, learning frameworks, and the experiences of educators and learners who use them. Our hope is that researchers will find valuable contributions to the scholarly literature and that educators and policy makers will find useful insights as they consider how best to support the learning needs of students of all ages around the world.

Justin Reich

Nichole Pinkard

Series Editors, Learning in Large-Scale Environments

Foreword

Casey Fiesler

It’s easy to focus on all the terrible things that networked technologies have brought into our lives—misinformation, harassment, polarization, automated inequality. These are all things that pull us farther apart rather than bring us together, but it doesn’t have to be that way. This book describes one such counternarrative, an example of how the same affordances of the internet that allow for those negative experiences have also created and nurtured a positive community that has touched countless lives—including mine.

When I first logged on to AOL as a teenager in the mid-nineties, one of the first things I remember searching for in this exciting new online world was Star Trek. From AOL I stumbled onto Usenet, and then alt.startrek.creative, and that’s where I discovered fanfiction. It felt like something clicked into place for me; through sharing my own Star Trek stories, I found a writing community and, in fact, a learning community. I didn’t have the words to describe it then, but the positive feedback that helped me grow as a writer was an example of the distributed mentoring described in this book.

As the internet became an increasingly important part of our lives, it also became an important topic for scholarly research that teaches us not only about technology but also about our world and ourselves. From communication to education to computer science and beyond, a variety of academic fields have explored how online platforms such as Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and Scratch serve as communities where people can share, learn, and connect. As I moved through research communities myself, I was surprised not to see more people paying attention to fanfiction writers and readers as another remarkable example of an online community—one that might even have lessons for how to make our other networked spaces more welcoming and positive.

So when I first saw Cecilia Aragon presenting some of her and Katie Davis’s first work on this topic, a detailed ethnography subtitled Thousands of Positive Reviews, I wanted to jump up and down for joy. They had captured precisely what I thought everyone needed to know about fanfiction communities—the positivity, the learning experiences, the social benefits, and more. The type of mentorship they describe was something I experienced myself, improving my own writing with the help of constructive feedback and, even more importantly, encouragement. I have a number of friends who are now successful published authors and who got their start in fanfiction—and more still who are writing fanfiction read by tens of thousands of people.

The concept of distributed mentoring described in this book captures what makes online fanfiction communities such ideal spaces for informal learning. The sheer abundance of feedback, the variety of perspectives, the cumulative nature of learning, the persistent availability of experiences to learn from, and the positive norms surrounding critique have all evolved from the combination of the culture of fanfiction and the affordances of networked technologies. Taken together, those thousands of positive reviews have contributed to the education and support of countless young people who have improved their writing and made important social connections while doing so.

In addition, the social norms that Cecilia and Katie describe in the context of distributed mentoring influence not just feedback around writing but the entire culture of the community. In my own work, I have done extensive research around the fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3), which is itself a wonderful example of what fanfiction communities can create. AO3’s founders built their own platform from scratch in 2008, and today it has almost 2 million users. They also designed it with the values of their community—respect, positivity, and inclusiveness—in mind. Just as Cecilia and Katie’s research participants describe fanfiction as a labor of love, the same is true of the archive itself. Even developers I interviewed—all women, a stark contrast to other open source projects—described the learning environment (this time for coding, not writing) as loving. Similar to the stories of young people who found that supportive encouragement from the fanfiction community spurred them to improve their writing, the same kind of social relationships helped more women learn to code.

As you will learn in this book, fanfiction communities also include a large number of young people who are creating and learning and even teaching. They are proof that young people can accomplish amazing things—not just through their creativity but also through collective action. For example, the fan activist group the Harry Potter Alliance has mobilized tens of thousands to advocate for causes such as human rights and literacy. Fanfiction writers also advocate for themselves; the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (which also supports AO3) has helped shape copyright policy to support fair use.

These communities are also inclusive spaces where young people can be themselves and geek out about the things they love in a place where they’ll be celebrated for it. Fanfiction communities can even function as important support spaces for LGBTQ teens who may not have this support elsewhere in their lives. The story in the introduction of this book of an isolated teen who found a vital social outlet in fanfiction communities is just one of countless more. Over the course of my research, I’ve heard multiple stories about how these communities literally save lives.

Fanfiction, fan communities, and geek culture are becoming more mainstream, and fan studies—an interdisciplinary field that crosses media studies, literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and social science—is also beginning to touch fields such as computer science. This book builds upon a long history in fan studies of drawing attention to the depth, appeal, and power of both fanworks and the communities that create and surround them; however, the concept of distributed mentoring is something new. By combining ethnography and data science, Cecilia and Katie have been able to rigorously establish and detail something that will ring true to anyone familiar with fanfiction as well as provide new insights that will help fans see their communities in a new light while also illustrating how much the rest of the world can learn from them.

This book is a wonderful example of such a cross-disciplinary learning opportunity. Fanfiction communities might showcase the power of distributed mentoring, but as readers will discover, this concept could have much broader applications. Creativity bubbles up from every corner of our networked spaces—from artwork (DeviantArt) to knitting (Ravelry) to modding games (Minecraft). When you combine these creative projects with a community of people who share a similar passion and knowledge, the result is a community of learning as well. This book provides deep insights into one organically successful example—and thus a roadmap for how designers might better support distributed mentoring in other online affinity spaces.

As someone who spent some time as a teenager in the secret garden of fanfiction communities myself, I can attest to their transformative power. I hope that many more young people get to have that same experience. Maybe they’ll find it in the new kinds of affinity spaces—ones that bring us together rather than pull us apart—that this book can help inspire.

Acknowledgments

The ideas we’ve generated in this book have been shaped by years of discussion with dozens of people whose names may not all be mentioned here. We are grateful in particular to the members of the fandom communities who have shared their stories with the world and, in so doing, enriched ours.

Our editor at the MIT Press, Susan Buckley, deserves credit for being the one who first approached us with the idea of writing a book on this topic. She went on to provide invaluable support throughout the writing process.

This book would never have been written if not for the hard work and excitement of our talented students at the University of Washington:

• The students in our first fanfiction directed research group in 2013—Sarah Evans, Julie Ann Campbell, Abigail Evans, and David Randall—spent nine months and hundreds of hours conducting a detailed ethnography into three fandoms.

• We are especially grateful to Sarah Evans, now an assistant professor at Texas Woman’s University, whose enthusiasm and contributions to the project have extended over five years.

• John Frens came up with the original idea of comparing lexical diversity with abundance of reviews, implemented much of the software, and conducted rigorous statistical analyses to find the correlations.

• Ruby Davis, fanfiction author and student researcher extraordinaire, generously allowed us to share her personal story throughout this book.

• Kodlee Yin wrote tools to collect much of the fanfiction data and incorporated differential privacy into our database to protect the young creators.

• Jihyun Lee, Deepa Agrawal, Niharika Sharma, Diana Zhang, and Meg Drouhard contributed software, data analysis, and visualizations.

We are grateful to Heather Jean Uhl, our initial librarian informant in 2013, who gave us inspiration and confirmation that our research interests were worth pursuing.

We thank all our interview and survey participants for enthusiastically sharing their experiences with us.

At the University of Washington, we wish to thank the Information School (UW iSchool) and the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering for providing significant support and a home for our research. We are also grateful for the existence of the DUB (Design, Use, Build) community, which provided the initial conditions (lunch) for our first meeting. In addition, we had fruitful conversations with UW colleagues, including Brock Craft and many others.

The UW iSchool GA Crew provided us with superb editing and formatting assistance under tight deadlines. Specifically, we are appreciative of Julianne Peeling’s attention to detail in completely formatting all references and editing the final manuscript of the book. Marie Williams Chant, Jesse Van Hoy, and Julia Hon did a fantastic job wrangling our first-draft references on short notice.

At the MIT Press, our editor’s assistant, Noah Springer, and production editor, Liz Agresta, provided ongoing support throughout the editorial process. We also thank the anonymous expert reviewers from the MIT Press for their helpful ideas, which greatly strengthened the book.

Most of all, of course, we wish to thank our families, in particular Cecilia’s daughter, Diana, who first introduced her to fanfiction and provided many insightful ideas, and her son, Ken, who convinced her that writing and vocabulary could be learned from online games as well as printed books. Katie wishes to extend a special thanks to her stepfather, Gordon Johnson, for flying to Seattle specifically to look after her son, Oliver, so that she could make our deadline to MIT.

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Introduction: The Secret Garden

The internet has opened up unprecedented opportunities for people of all ages to discover and connect with others who share their interests. Among the most popular interest-based communities are those that bring together fans of various media texts, including movies, TV shows, music bands, novels, and video games. Whether formed around classics (such as Star Trek, Doctor Who, or Blade Runner) or newer media texts (such as Breaking Bad,