A Computational Analysis of Inter-Authorial Influence Within Fanfiction Communities

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Although fanfiction is built on existing media properties, its reliance on shared worldbuilding and inspiration makes patterns of influence much more apparent within given communities than in other media environments; some call this derivative. Rather than debating the merits or weaknesses of fanfiction or making value judgments regarding its supposedly derivative nature, this project explores the role that influence — in particular, inter-authorial influence — plays in fanfiction production. Within literary communities where every work is already explicitly based upon one common world or group of characters, what does it mean when a fanfiction author cites a separate piece of fanfiction as inspiration for their work? Is this author’s work more similar to that one fanfic that inspired it than to every other fanfic centered around the same world or characters? My hypothesis is that fanfics that cite another fanfic as their inspiration will be more similar to their inspiration fanfic than to other fanfics within the same fandom in both in terms of the words used in the stories and in terms of the overall emotional arcs of the stories. This project explores whether fanfic pairings in which one work was cited as having inspired the other are more similar to each other than fanfic pairings within the same fandom but without any noted influence according to the metrics of cosine similarity and sentiment-arc variance.

Author	Johnson, Natasha

Subject	fanfiction
Subject	Cosine Similarity
Subject	Natural language processing (Computer science)
Subject	Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Subject	Fan magazines
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/zm212kh6889
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/zm212kh6889

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license (CC0).

Preferred citation: Johnson, N. (2023). A Computational Analysis of Inter-Authorial Influence Within Fanfiction Communities. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/zm212kh6889. https://doi.org/10.25740/zm212kh6889.

Undergraduate Honors Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University

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