Fan-Fiction and AO3 Free-Form Tagging Practice: Innovating Open-Source Tools for Tag Network Visualization and Analysis

The thesis focuses on obtaining, representing, analyzing, and visualizing tag data within the Archive of Our Own (AO3) fan fiction archive, with a focus on the ``Additional Tags" category. The work was undertaken in four components. First, network nomenclature was defined and formally-defined network representations were developed for the AO3 Additional Tag structure. Second, computational techniques were developed to scrape the data from AO3, both in its current state and in its archival state (from the Wayback Machine) and to store it in a format suitable for subsequent processing. Third, techniques were developed to use the scraped data in order to computationally instantiate and visualize the network structures that were developed in the first component. Finally, in the fourth component, a set of network analysis techniques were developed, which were used to extract quantitative characteristics of the networks, to identify relevant changes over time, and to identify co-creation actions between different users in the AO3 community.