Fanfiction: the underestimated way of getting into Digital Humanities.

Fanfiction is, unwittingly, the first approach to Digital Humanities for many Gen Z women and girls, long before they realize what Digital Humanities is or that it exists as a field of study. Most of us read fanfiction throughout our teenage years simply to decompress, completely unaware of the complex digital systems we were engaging with. I focus specifically on people who identify as female for two reasons. The first is my own perspective as a Gen Z woman. The second, and more significant, reason is that studies show approximately 72 to 98 percent of readers on global fanfiction platforms identify as female, forming the vast majority of the readership (Fiesler et al., Transformative Works and Cultures).

What we rarely realize when first visiting platforms like Archive of Our Own (AO3) is that we are interacting with a complex, fully realized archive. It possesses its own cultural heritage and houses countless subcultures, with distinct communities forming around every fandom. Because of the preservation-first philosophy on which AO3 was built, any fandom can be hosted on the site regardless of its size. If someone wants to write about it, it can be published and archived (Campbell, AO3: The Mad Woman in the Open Source Attic).

What makes an archive like AO3 particularly fascinating, as linguistic researcher Katherine Fair points out, is its dual tagging process. To understand this, we first need to define what a tag is. A tag is a short combination of words describing the contents, fandoms, and themes of a fanfiction work, allowing readers to discover stories easily using search filters.

The two tagging processes differ based on the perspective of the person creating them. One process operates from inside the community, carried out by the author or readers commenting on a work. The second process operates from an organizational perspective, carried out by volunteers who act as digital librarians on behalf of the archive. These volunteers add standardized, widely recognized tags to make stories discoverable, a role officially known as Tag Wrangling.

The role of a Tag Wrangler is vital to the archive's infrastructure because an archive requires structured organization and consistent terminology. However, fulfilling this role demands a deep understanding of the specific fandoms hosted on the platform. Each fandom creates or adapts its own language. Authors frequently invent variations of well-known tags, such as using "Dead Dove: Do Not Eat" to indicate dark or disturbing themes, creating endless sub-variations to convey specific levels of intensity. Similarly, the standard "No Beta Reader" tag often evolves into fandom-specific jokes like "No Beta Reader We Die Like [insert any character who dies in canon]." Tag Wranglers must understand the humor, references, and evolving language shared within each specific community to connect these custom tags to broader categories.

Given the platform's user demographics, this system also introduces a subtle form of implicit bias or visibility hierarchy. Larger fandoms, particularly those producing content and tags in English, are served more effectively to the broader user base. This occurs because Tag Wranglers can decode the humor, language, and cultural context of these dominant groups far more easily, leaving smaller or non-English fandoms less indexed and harder to discover (Fair, Archive of Our Own: The Paradox of Uncensored Organization).