Work Text:
The OTW recently announced the import of FictionAlley to AO3 through the Open Doors project. Open Doors helps preserve fanworks by (among other things) importing external fanwork archives as collections on AO3. I was interested in the newsletter statement, “With approximately 29,000 works imported so far, it is Open Doors' largest import yet”—it made me curious about all of the work Open Doors has done over the years.
I looked up the list of Open Doors archives and all of the corresponding collections on AO3 (e.g., here’s the FictionAlley collection). Based on the number of imported works in each collection*, I calculated the following:
*Some of the collections are open to people adding more works (e.g., the Yuletide collection contains imported works from before AO3 existed and also lots more that people have added since 2009), while others are closed archives that only include the historical fanworks imported from a specific archive. In the case of archives that are open to newer works, I sorted by date posted and tried to only include the works up to the date that the Open Doors import was completed.
I also looked at the biggest collections Open Doors has imported:
Whoa – the FictionAlley import is more than four times as big as the next largest Open Doors import (HP Fandom)! In fact, FictionAlley comprises about 18% of the fanworks imported via Open Doors!
I noticed that some of the Open Doors imports were very small; there are a few collections with fewer than 20 fanworks. So I graphed how many of the imports have been various sizes:
One third of the Open Doors collections have fewer than 200 works, and just over half have fewer than 500 works. On the larger end, nearly one third of the collections have over 1K works, and (as we saw before), FictionAlley is the only one with more than 10K works.
I was also curious about which fandoms have had the most fanworks imported via Open Doors. I approximated this as follows, for Fandom X:
- I summed up the fanworks from all archived dedicated solely to Fandom X.
- For multi-fandom archives, I only looked at the biggest fandom. if the biggest fandom was Fandom X, I added that to the total for Fandom X. I ignored the rest.
- I grouped some fandoms together by shared universe where applicable, like Stargate or Buffyverse.
NB: This method means I didn’t include a lot of the fanworks from multi-fandom archives; there were 17 multi-fandom archives with a total of 14K fanworks that I didn’t count (7.6K fanworks excluding Yuletide).
Using this approximation, we get the following list of fandoms:
These fandoms have all been around a long time (which makes sense; most newer fandoms probably never had their own dedicated websites thanks to the existence of broad archives like Fanfiction.net and AO3).
Even if we exclude FictionAlley, Harry Potter has the most imported fanworks (25K)—but the difference between it and LotR is less stark.
I also took a look at the FictionAlley collection specifically. The original site categorized works by genre and/or length (e.g., the Schnoogle section contained novel-length fanfic of all genres) – I got category info from the FictionAlley Fanlore page. After the Open Doors import, the original section (or “house”) is usually listed in an AO3 tag such as “Originally Posted on FictionAlley.org The Dark Arts.”
Angst & darker themes had the most fanworks, followed closely by romance.
The works from FictionAlley also usually specify which HP book(s) inspired them and/or when they were written, and I was curious which books and eras generated the most fanfic:
The rainbow colors correspond to the books of the main series, and “written pre-X” is shown in the same color as Book X, but a lighter shade. Non-main series books are shown in gray. (And I’m aware of the irony of potentially evoking the pride flag here given JKR’s TERF views, but using rainbow order to correspond to time order helps quickly help me parse this chart, and I’m not going to let JKR’s horrific bigotry interfere with my data visualization tools. ;P )
The first four books were tagged the most, and close to equally, though PoA had slightly more uses than the rest. The publication era that was tagged most was pre-HBP. All the other HP-related books, including Beedle the Bard and Cursed Child, were tagged in fewer than 1,000 works, and are not shown here.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this dive into the Open Doors project! Big thanks to the Open Doors volunteers for preserving all these fanworks (and more). <3