From fandoms to heritage. Understanding fanfiction forums as Digital Heritage Communities

Abstract

Should fanfiction forums be considered an instance of Digital Heritage Communities? Departing from the mainstream approach according to which Heritage Communities relate to intangible goods or material collections of Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs), we rather focus on the creative and cultural participatory assets enhanced by the advent of digital media (such as fanfictions) and the online communities (resp., fandoms) that support them. Here, we study by means of computational techniques the case of the Archive of Our Own (AO3), an Internet forum created and managed by fanfiction writers willing to share their work with a global fandom community. We find that AO3 cultivates a prosocial relational atmosphere that favors the emergence of stable sub-communities committed to writing, reading and enriching fanfictions as a shared cultural resource (a commons). Such features align with those outlined as characteristic of Heritage Communities, while emerging around a yet undervalued form of ‘born-digital’ cultural assets.