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walkingshadow) wrote2010-04-26 01:30 pm
i read dead russian authors volumes at a time
Do you save fanfiction for personal archival purposes?
Yes.
127 (85.8%)
No.
5 (3.4%)
I did in the past, but I don't anymore.
13 (8.8%)
It might seem like a simple question, but it doesn't have a simple answer (see comments).
3 (2.0%)
How long do you keep (or plan to keep) the fic you save?
Until I've read it.
3 (2.1%)
For a length of time dependent on some variable(s) I will detail in comments.
2 (1.4%)
It varies depending on the story and/or my reason for saving it initially.
70 (48.3%)
FOREVER.
70 (48.3%)
What fic saving/storage method(s) do you currently employ?
Saving digital copies to my computer in html/txt/pdf/etc. format.
119 (81.5%)
Saving digital copies to my mobile device.
11 (7.5%)
Burning digital copies to disks.
17 (11.6%)
Local bookmarking in my browser.
69 (47.3%)
Online bookmarking via delicious.
89 (61.0%)
Online bookmarking via a site other than delicious.
20 (13.7%)
Adding to my [live]journal memories.
36 (24.7%)
Printing out stories from the internet.
33 (22.6%)
Storing fanzines (hard copies).
13 (8.9%)
Some other method(s) which I will expound upon in comments.
6 (4.1%)
Have you changed your system over time?
No. The system I currently use is the system I've always had.
42 (29.2%)
Yes. My system has changed at least once since I began reading fanfiction.
102 (70.8%)
Are you satisfied with your current system?
Yes.
57 (39.0%)
Yes, but based on emerging fandom trends and/or my own changing habits and/or new tools/technology, I suspect that might change sometime in the forseeable future.
49 (33.6%)
No, and I'm in the process of adjusting it to accommodate emerging fandom trends and/or my own changing habits and/or new tools/technology.
13 (8.9%)
No, but I'm not sure what changes I should make to it.
27 (18.5%)
If you use more than one method, how much redundancy do you have in place?
Little or no redundancy: stories are either in hard copy, on a hard drive, in the cloud, etc., but they're each in only one location/format.
39 (28.3%)
Partial redundancy: some stories exist in more than one location/format.
77 (55.8%)
Total redundancy: my entire catalog is mirrored in at least one other location/format.
22 (15.9%)
Assuming we're talking only about stories that you wanted or would have wanted to save, how does your collection of saved works compare to your actual fic consumption history?
My collection of saved works closely matches up to the number of stories I have read.
15 (10.3%)
My collection of saved works underrepresents the number of stories I have read.
121 (82.9%)
My collection of saved works overrepresents the number of stories I have read.
13 (8.9%)
Not counting the duplicates (if you have a redundant system), how many stories do you have saved, total?
Less than 100.
21 (14.5%)
Between 100 and 500.
37 (25.5%)
Between 500 and 1,000.
17 (11.7%)
Between 1,000 and 5,000.
37 (25.5%)
Between 5,000 and 10,000.
12 (8.3%)
Between 10,000 and 50,000.
4 (2.8%)
Between 50,000 and 100,000.
0 (0.0%)
More than 100,000.
2 (1.4%)
More than 1,000,000!!
0 (0.0%)
It's too complicated to estimate.
15 (10.3%)
If it's a different number than the number of stories you've saved, would you care to estimate how many stories you've read in your fannish lifetime? Round to the nearest order of magnitude, or feel free to just laugh into the text box instead.
And when did you first start reading fanfiction?
Before the advent of the internet.
10 (6.8%)
After the advent of the internet, but before the age of the mailing list.
6 (4.1%)
During the age of the mailing list, but before the days of the web archive and the author homepage.
18 (12.2%)
During the days of the web archive and the author homepage, but before the migration to journal-based fandom.
79 (53.4%)
After the migration to journal-based fandom, but before the rise of social bookmarking.
29 (19.6%)
Since the rise of social bookmarking.
1 (0.7%)
Your brief history of fandom is inaccurate and/or incomplete, and I had a different fannish entry point, which I will describe in comments.
5 (3.4%)
Obviously this poll is limited to my own experiences and knowledge, so I would dearly love to hear about the practices that work for you. Or practices that are no longer working for you! There's also the fact that I myself am exclusively a reader and not a writer of fanfiction. If you're a writer, does that affect your archiving habits? Do you handle your own fic differently? What about saving other fannish works, like art and podfic and vids and meta? I'm especially unfamiliar with fanart communities and their homes on the web, and with vids I very quickly run into the problem of limited disk space. So what do you do?
Here's how my current system is set up: every story I read that I ever want to lay my hands on again, I a) save in html format to my laptop (which subsequently gets backed up to an external drive) and b) bookmark in my delicious account. It's important to me to have both, since anything can disappear from the internet at any moment (sites go down, links break, C&D letters are served, authors pull their work, etc.), but a library in the cloud is, by definition and design, accessible a) to anyone b) from anywhere. Thus, in a perfect world I would have a perfectly redundant system consisting of local, offline electronic copies and the corresponding referral links to the online versions of those stories.
But (spoiler!) it isn't a perfect world, and this is how things actually shake out:
As of this moment I have approximately 7,700 stories saved to my hard drive (and backed up on an external drive), a number that wildly underrepresents the amount of fanfiction I have actually read, even just counting the stuff I have read and loved. I first discovered "fandom" and fanfiction via Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the summer of 1998 and read exclusively and extensively in it (Buffy/Angel omg! and AOL! and web rings!) until 2001. And yet I only have, let me count . . . ONE Buffy story saved to my hard drive, and it was posted three months ago. At the time, I kept browser bookmarks of my favorite sites in my AOL account, but that was on my parents' computer, and they were lost to the ether when that machine failed. In the meantime, I had gone off to college with my own computer.
I first started saving stories some time toward the end of 2002, well after I'd discovered (simultaneously) Smallville and slash and livejournal (and fandom again, but for real this time), but I didn't have a saving policy, something helpful and exhaustive like "save every story that you might ever want to lay your hands on again". Over the next couple of years I read what probably amounted to thousands of stories across a whole bunch of fandoms (especially Smallville, popslash, Sports Night, Highlander, Due South, The Sentinel, Lotrips, and Harry Potter), but I saved a vanishingly small percentage of it all. During the summer of 2002 I tore through the entire (now defunct) Our Boys Sorkinfic archive but saved zero stories from it. As of one month ago (I've since had a renaissance!), I had only nine Highlander stories saved. NINE. I started saving scrupulously (using the above-mentioned policy) somewhere in or around 2004, when I was into Harry Potter for at least the second time around (the Remus/Sirius redux), Star Trek (TOS), and M*A*S*H.
By the end of 2005 (SGA, et al.) I had created my delicious account, and by early 2006 I was using it in fits and starts; it wasn't until three years later, in January of 2009 (Merlin), that I began bookmarking scrupulously—that is, bookmarking every story I saved. I have approximately 3,200 stories bookmarked there now, less than half the number of stories I have saved offline; but I have another couple of thousand unread stories bookmarked, to keep my number of open browser tabs to a minimum, and for rainy days.
At this point I don't know if I'm ever going to attempt to gather all those stories I read but never saved, assuming that I would WANT to; assuming I could remember any titles or authors or what songs the songfics were based on (lol j/k, it was Sarah McLachlan); assuming I could find them again, which presumes that they're even still available anywhere, or will ever be made available again, e.g. on the AO3. And then there's the matter of retroactively bookmarking the stories I saved in pre-delicious times: the thought of having them all together in one neatly-tagged* place is incredibly attractive, but hideously daunting. And at the end of the day, is delicious even the right place for it?
* And THAT'S a whole mess of meta for another day.
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Liked it: delicious
Will definitely want to reread: delicious with a favorite tag
Loved it so much I want access to it in case the power goes out and I'm bereft of the internet for hours and hours: html saved to my hard drive
Loved it so much I want to take a highlighter to it: printouts in a 3-ring binder.
Those are cumulative, so stories in the last category will also belong to the first three.
Before I was on LJ I pasted urls into a Word doc on my parents' computer (I didn't use browser bookmarks because I didn't want them to know I was reading porn in junior high), and when I first got on LJ it was to read WIPs, so I didn't really need to bookmark anything for a while. This was before the journal migration had really sunk its teeth in, so most people were still writing long chaptered fics instead of oneshots. I got a delicious in fall 2005, and mostly used it in place of browser bookmarks, combining fannish and non-fannish links. About a year later I joined SPN fandom, which was my first non-HP fandom and thus my first exposure to the mainline slash-based media fandom at large. Back then I used to bookmark pretty much everything regardless of quality (I've been meaning to go back and cull the badfic), but the older I get the pickier I get, so it's been evening out. I do need to go back and revamp the tags on the older links, though. *frets*
I save vids to my hard drive when I can, but I do have a disk space issue. I also try to save their header posts to my delicious, but occasionally I forget. Meta also gets saved to the delicious. Also I have a "to be read" tag with about 150 fics in it. It always seems to get longer. *keeps fretting*
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I didn't use browser bookmarks because I didn't want them to know I was reading porn in junior high
Oh man, I hear you! In my family we all had separate accounts in AOL so as long as I signed off when I left the computer (and I was MILITANT about that), my bookmarks were private.
This was before the journal migration had really sunk its teeth in, so most people were still writing long chaptered fics instead of oneshots.
This is interesting, and something I haven't given a whole lot of thought to, that livejournal opened up fic writing to different lengths and formats and structures. It probably goes hand in hand with the generational shift and the change in writing style from the older, purpler prose.
I save vids to my hard drive when I can, but I do have a disk space issue. I also try to save their header posts to my delicious, but occasionally I forget. Meta also gets saved to the delicious.
I do the same. Though I was dismayed the other day when I was looking through the meta I'd bookmarked over the years to find so many broken links and locked-down posts. And vids are more likely to disappear from the internet than anything! What then? Enter the AO3?
Also I have a "to be read" tag with about 150 fics in it. It always seems to get longer. *keeps fretting*
TRUEST. My "unread" tag had something totally ludicrous like 1,400 bookmarks, and having them mixed in with the stories I HAD read (and had decided were worth keeping) was really anxiety-inducing. I solved it by creating a totally separate delicious account and dumping all my unread bookmarks in there, and instead of feeling guilty that I haven't read every single story in it, I use it as a resource for when I'm between fandoms and aimless, or ready to tackle a particular fandom (either again or for the first time). My delicious tags still give me a ridiculous amount of anxiety, between their inconsistencies due to changes I've made in my bookmarking practices, the gaps I want to fill in, and my attempts to figure out how everybody ELSE is doing it so I can get on the same page with them and maximize the social part of social bookmarking. *frets with you*
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I think my "unread" tag and I have made peace, if only because I'm in a stage right now where I don't have a primary fandom, so I just keep rotation through phases. If I bookmark something and don't read it right away, either I'll come back to it in a few months or I'll delete it later ("later" currently meaning "not yet"). I also have a WIP tag that I check whenever I remember to, which can lead to moments of "OMG YAY THERE ARE FIVE NEW CHAPTERS."
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Huh. At the time I definitely didn't have my finger on the pulse of fandom to be aware of things like that. I can understand being aware of how much will fit into a single post, but did writers really curtail their writing (consciously or unconsciously) based on that word limit? Did you? I was actually thinking of flashfic, challenges like
I'm in a stage right now where I don't have a primary fandom
That seems to be going around lately. It feels like a lot of fandoms are winding down, but nothing's really winding up.
I also have a WIP tag that I check whenever I remember to, which can lead to moments of "OMG YAY THERE ARE FIVE NEW CHAPTERS."
Haha, yes! It took me a while to figure it out, but the secret to happy WIP-following is to FORGET ABOUT THE WIP until it's updated again. \o/
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There's a research paper in here somewhere! I wonder what would be a good way to quantify some of these trends so they could be tracked over time. Is it even possible? There'd have to be at least some element of interviewing or surveying in the methodology, at least to measure perception and changing habits.
I never subbed to mailing lists so I have no personal experience reading stories of that length posted in that fashion, and I've only read a couple on livejournal (e.g. Switch by
The possibility for comparisons across media is also intriguing, as "serial fic - stories that were intended to be read as WIPs and possibly continue on forever" sounds like nothing so much as the definition of a soap opera.
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I actually think the new successor to serial mailing-list fic is commentfic, especially on kinkmemes. It's that same open-ended feeling. (Now I'm wondering if LJ introducing the
stalkerpintracking tool prompted the rise of commentfic, because I know it changed how I read them.)sounds like nothing so much as the definition of a soap opera
And that's really interesting, because one of the books I'm reading for this research paper talks about how soap operas are about telling the same story over and over, with lots of repetition and never a real ending, and that's actually a pretty good description for fandom.
And to your ETA: And this is why I love my WIP tag. :D
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!!! First of all, good luck with it! Second of all, do you plan on making this paper available to the internet? Because I would read that paper SO HARD.
I actually think the new successor to serial mailing-list fic is commentfic, especially on kinkmemes. It's that same open-ended feeling.
Well-spotted! Also: stalkerpin, ahahha.
And that's really interesting, because one of the books I'm reading for this research paper talks about how soap operas are about telling the same story over and over, with lots of repetition and never a real ending, and that's actually a pretty good description for fandom.
It totally IS, that's so cool! Fandom's ENTIRE PREMISE is that there is no real ending. I would also add that fandom is comprised of not only lots of repetition, but multiple concurrent iterations. That is, there are not just many copies, but many versions, developed both in parallel and in succession as responses or a progression (see: fanon); we can hold many contradictory ideas in our heads and believe them all to be true. More than a single story, for fandom it's the storytelling that has no real ending. Fandom by definition has a multitude of storytellers, all writing variations on a theme.
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I look forward to the day!