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While starting as an analogue practice in fanzines, fanfiction in its current form, that is, almost exclusively online, is closely entangled with the technology it is embedded in, both Web 2.0 features and specific website infrastructure. This is nowhere better exemplified than on the platform Archive of Our Own (AO3), which hosts over 13 million stories in thousands of fandoms. AO3 is one of the most popular online repositories for fanfiction and growing exponentially, precisely because of how it deals with this slew of data: its system of extensive hyperlinked labelling. Based on empirical participant data from an online survey and semi-structured interviews, I argue that tags offer distinct affordances and affect user behaviour in such a way that new reading practices arise. Tags create a literacy paradigm interwoven with virtuality, relying on links and networks, and featuring a unique set of characteristics that differentiate reading on AO3 from other digital reading platforms, as well as from print fiction. These include "informed" reading, whereby site users know what they can expect from works, "rhizomatic" reading by navigating across the platform along the metadata, even to unfamiliar fandoms, and reading in multiple, which is facilitated by the site's searchability.
Fabienne Silberstein-Bamford (Tue,) studied this question.