Fanfic Tagging, AO3, and the Tag Wrangling Model
If you are not familiar with AO3, Gretchen McCulloch’s “Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online” in Wired is a great introduction to the site’s hybrid tagging model and the value of tag wranglers.
Ludi Price’s “Fandom, Folksonomies and Creativity: the case of the Archive of Our Own” offers a brief introduction to the tag wrangling process.
The AO3 workflow is described in more detail in Julia Bullard’s dissertation and her paper “Curated Folksonomies,” with diagrams taken from the tag wranglers’ internal documentation. (While the wranglers’ general guidelines are public, the training documentation is not.) Bullard also has a paper on tag wrangling volunteers’ motivations that may be useful in thinking through potential library implementations, and a discussion of competing warrants in tag wrangling.
The FanLIS conference’s list of resources is a continuously updated list that includes a fan-tagging category.
Controlled Vocabularies for Fiction
Among the available controlled vocabularies for fiction in English, the NoveList Guide to Story Elements is the closest to our ideal. We have also drawn from the Video Game Metadata Schema, created by the GAMER Group at the UW iSchool.
Our general approach to categorizing fiction was informed by the work of Clare Beghtol, Annalise Pejtersen, Pauline Rafferty, Jaarmo Saarti, and Judith Ranta.
Full Bibliography
(Also available on zbib.org)
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