So in case you haven't heard about fanfiction yet, fanfiction is literature that is created

by fans for fans without a commercial interest in mind. And so usually when we talk about

fanfiction, two of these aspects come at the forefront, intertextuality and community.

You can define these types of intertextuality with different levels of aggression, I would

say, because Henry Jenkins famously called fanfiction writers textual poters. And then

you can also say, well, they just use copyrighted material or they develop already existing

root texts. And Abigail de Reco, for example, says that they are writing archontic literature,

which describes this intertextual relationship more softly and without being so hierarchical,

like if you use the words derivative or appropriated literature. And of course, then again, we immediately

come to the community. So fan texts are created within a community and often for the community.

But then in the next sentence, usually you will read about the quantity. There is a lot

of fanfiction out there. And this is also the reason, according to some scholars, for

example, Francesca Coppa, that why fanfiction hasn't been picked up by literary studies

yet, because there's just too much of it and it's hard to focus on one thing in particular.

She actually composed a fanfiction reader with sample fanfictions to provide some baseline

for research. And she writes about it. It's there in the corner about this book. She writes,

the most perverse thing about this book is that I'm giving you one Pringle, one Dorito

and one Oreo, a single nacho, one pretzel nugget, a tiny little test a teaspoon of ice

cream, one pita triangle worth of hummus. Then she of course says that you're not supposed

to eat just one Dorito and goes on to say that the experience of fandom, especially

in the age of the internet, is one of binge reading. Most new fans upon discovering it

gobble it down. And even in the 1990s, so this is digital fandom, but even in the 1990s,

Camille Bacon Smith wrote that first experiences of fandom are measured in inches or stacks

rather than in titles. And this is when you had to acquire fandoms via zines that are

somehow redistributed to you. So we have these three aspects, intertextuality, community

and quantity. And why I find this important in the context of the social system of literature

and digital methods is because we all know that there is this triad of author, reader

and text. And of course we also know that there are other key forces like archival institutions

or publishers or libraries who all deal with canonization. And Heidebrandt and Winkow describe

this entire social subsystem with its actions and institution, the social system of literature.

And some even say that literary history focuses on either the author or the reader or the

text in different periods of its existence. And I think that now when we are talking about

digital social reading so much, we can say that today literary history would do well

while focusing on the social system of literature altogether. And what better way to do this

than with digital methods? So we have different processes in place, the role of the author

changes, we have different financing models and traditional publishing has to ease the

process up because authors can now distribute their texts differently, maybe through social

media. Then we see that there are different models of authorship. We are used to the single

author, because this is something that has been established through copyright since the

19th century, but now other models of authorship are resurfacing within digital spaces for

example. At the same time for fan fiction authors, it is quite hard to distance themselves

from these older authorship models and this is why many fan fictions start with the paratext

of how people are not going to use the characters for any kind of financial gain as a safeguard

against copyright claims. And so we see that fan fiction is actually neatly fits into this

history of authorship and inter literary history as well. So in order to look at the

social system of literature, what I'm coming to you with is a relational corpus from the

website fanfiction.de. fanfiction.de is a German speaking fan fiction website which

was, which exists since 2004 and it hosts both fan fictions and what is known as free

works like original works. Today it covers over 1.4 thousand fandoms and over 400 thousand

texts. It also has around 60, the corpus I'm working with has around 67 thousand texts