Fanfiction Folksonomy Case Study: Our Flag Means Death on Archive of Our Own
By: Autumn Brown
This project investigates folksonomy development over time by recording freeform tags applied
to fanfictions on Archive of Our Own (AO3). It begins by scraping AO3 search results, pulling
story (‘fic’) title, author, date of update, and all freeform tags. That data is then exported as
JSON, where the next program determines the total number of stories scraped, total number of
tags scraped, total number of tags that are used more than twice, and the top ten tags used.
The tag data is grouped by week of update, exported to JSON, where the final program pulls the
top five tags used for each week.