Book dossier

Writers in the Secret Garden - Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring

by Cecilia Aragon, Katie Davis, Casey Fiesler

"While the enormous corpa of fanfiction has started to get scholarly attention, there have been few studies of how young writers are learning by contributing to these online communities. The existing studies that look at the writing and editing processes in fanfiction use individual works and authors rather than large scale quantitative research. Katie Davis and Cecilia Aragon -- an education researcher and a data scientist -- have formed a very productive partnership investigating the mechanisms of literacy formation on fanfiction sites. In this book, Aragon and Davis combine qualitative and quantitative analysis of fanfiction communities. Their five-year project used mixed-methods research, including in-depth ethnographic studies and computational analyses of vast data sets, uncovering a new kind of mentoring -- distributed mentoring -- uniquely suited to networked communities. The authors describe the evolving space of fanfiction and then develop the seven attributes of distributed mentoring: aggregation, accretion, acceleration, abundance, availability, asynchronicity, and affect. To test the theory of distributed mentoring quantitatively using this massive corpus, the authors longitudinally tracked lexical diversity over stories as authors received feedback. The combination of ethnography and data science makes this work unique, and should be of interest well beyond the core audience of literacy researchers"--