The collection I will consider does call itself an archive, though it is very different from the mystique-bound building with the “motifs and columns” and “labyrinth of corridors” that Mbembe describes (19). It exists only on the internet, so, though it does offer a variety of design schemes (“skins”) with which to view its content, and though it does contain something of a labyrinth of hyperlinks through which its visitors navigate its holdings, it does not possess—according to my subjective interpretation, at least—“the nature of a temple and a cemetery” (19). The collection in question (I am not sure I should call it an “archive,” given that it exists in some ways in opposition to a collection of official state or scholarly documents like those referenced in Manoff’s essay) is the Archive of Our Own (archiveofourown.org), “a fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, non-commercial archive for transformative fanworks” in various media formats.
The AO3, as it is often known, for its initials (and as I will call it, so as to avoid the potential confusion inherent in referring to it as “the Archive”) presents visitors to its home page with a menu bar including four options: “Fandoms,” “Browse,” “Search,” and “About.” In so doing it privileges the organization of its collected works by “fandom,” that is, by the source material on which each transformative (some might say derivative) work is based. Fandoms are categorized by the media format of the source material: “Books & Literature,” “Movies,” “Video Games,” etc. This structure gives pride of place to the source material—so that, if I am seeking to view transformations/derivations of Shakespeare’s plays, I will know to click on “Theater.” When I do so, and am taken from the home page to an alphabetical listing of dramatic literature, I can click on “S” for “SHAKESPEARE William – Works,” or, if I am looking for work based on (for example) Hamlet specifically, I can click on “H” and find “Hamlet – Shakespeare.”
This organizational structure makes sense to a degree—if I were not familiar with Hamlet, I would probably have trouble following a good deal of written stories or audiobooks based on the plot and/or characters of that play. However, this organizational structure also tacitly reinforces the social hierarchy that places fans (the creators of transformative works) as subservient to professional “authors,” that is, the creators of “original” works (presuming one can, with a straight face, call Hamlet, or any one of (m)any of Shakespeare’s plays, “original”)—though it is also arguable that these “authors” are privileged not so much for their works’ (debatable) originality as for those works’ economic viability under current U.S. intellectual property law and the realities of present-day capitalist systems. Works published to the AO3 are free for anyone with an internet connection to view(/read/listen to); they are not intended as money-making ventures, and as such are to some degree denigrated in the larger culture, and even, as I have explicated, in the primary organizational structure of the AO3 itself.
Further exploration of these issues will take much more space than a single blog post allows, but I hope it is clear that, when one widens one’s definition of “archive” to include digital collections in addition to physical repositories of documents, and to construe “documents” as “simply objects that convey[…] information,” as Paul Otlet has proposed (Manoff 10), questions of the nature of the power vested in archivists’ hands become much more complex, colliding with traditional theories of archives in interesting and provocative ways.
February 4, 2015 at 10:46 pm
I wonder how much this is explicitly mitigated by the freeform tagging system that the OTW developed for AO3, though — I could browse by fandom (it would be an ease-of-use problem if one couldn’t, since that’s how many fanfic readers want to browse), but I could also, for example, have found a Hamlet/Ophelia fic by searching for “Character Death” and seeing it among pan-fandom examples from LOTR and the Hunger Games and the Legend of Korra (I’m using my actual browsing experience here.) Or someone could be a Tom Hiddleston fan and through that tag find a truly bewildering array of Corionalus-related pornographic fics. No, really, truly bewildering.
If anything, I’d tend to argue that of every fandom archive created, AO3 is in fact the least organized by fandom and does the best job of allowing cross-referencing and therefore deprioritizing the sort-by-fandom model that you point out. And in practice people do seem to use these features (whether they’re looking for fics with strong female characters, say, or participating in pan-fandom challenges, or just get off on a particular type of fic) despite fannish groups tending to sort themselves strongly by fandom for decades — it’s actually an interesting example of the technical aspects of the archive directly affecting not just the access to its contents but the production of further material, and the culture around it. And this, I think, is fairly neatly in line with the OTW’s broader agenda to clarify and legitimize the role of “transformative works” in our culture.
February 5, 2015 at 8:35 pm
Freeform tags tend to be a somewhat more haphazard, labor-intensive (for the searcher, and certainly for the site’s tag wranglers) way to browse than the well-organized division by fandoms, though, no? I had in mind not that the AO3 was a user-unfriendly or problematic site compared to other websites of a similar kind, but I wonder what it would look like if it were primarily organized by, say, the genre of the fanwork (horror/apocalyptic, humor, space travel alternate universe, etc.), or (as the site and the web evolve to accomodate other types of media) the medium of the fanwork (written fiction, visual art, video, etc.), rather than or in addition to being organized by fandom. How would a radically different organizational scheme impact site users’ reading(/viewing/listening) habits? How might such a scheme impact the creation of fanworks, given that the AO3 is often not where fanworks go after they or their creators have died (as in Mbembe) but (often) where they go as soon as they are ready for public consumption? Would fan creators make different kinds of stories/art if they knew that categorizing those works would ultimately be done very differently than presently?