Doing Archives: Notes on building a fanfiction community archive—a progress report
This is not a how-to for archives‼️In fact, you may read this and think the way we’ve gone about this is ridiculous (in which case, like, email us). This is a progress report on the Danish fanfiction archive, a project creating an archive of web-published fanfiction by Danes 🇩🇰The project is conceptualized as crowd-sourced and grounded in community with the goal to map Danish fanfiction.
The reading list
- Ahmed, Sara, “You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing: Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation.”
- Ashton, J. (2017) Feminist Archiving [a manifesto continued]: Skilling for Activism and Organising
- Ashikuzzaman, MD (2024) A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating and Managing Digital Archives
- Digital Preservation Coalition (2024). Community Archives Digital Preservation Toolkit
- Diem, C. and Royer, B. (2022) Memory in Uncertainty: Web Preservation in the Polycrisis
- Hall, Stuart, Constituting an archive, Third Text, 15:54, (2001)
- Lakshané, R (2024) Archiving feminist research as a method of preserving integrity and openness
- Verges, Francois. 2014. “A Museum without Objects”. The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressure of History. Iain Chambers, Alessandra de Angelis, Celeste Ianniciello, Mariangela Orabona & Michaela Quadraro
| The Idea
⭐️ The archive should be publicly accessible ⭐️ The archive should be community-driven and crowd-sourced—data coming from donations ⭐️ The archive should function as a practical resource for researchers to further the cultural research and focus into fan-culture, but also be a way for fanfiction communities to see themselves as part of a larger body of cultural labour |
| The dreams ☁️ Co-creation workshops where people can help shape the archive and what it’ll look like ☁️ Donation drive events where we can chat about fanfiction and bring people together
|
Netarkivet
So how do we learn about archives in practice? We went directly to the source—✨The Danish Royal Library✨. More specifically, we went to Netarkivet. Netarkivet is “responsible for collecting and preserving the Danish part of the Internet as part of the Danish Legal Deposit Act”—and lucky for us, they are the biggest internet-archiving nerds in Denmark, and love thinking about fanfiction and how to archive it. Having an ally in Netarkivet means that we can make sure that fanfiction is also preserved more long-term, by submitting links directly to them to consider.
Ethos
But how do we make this a practical reality? The feminist methods lab at ITU, 🧠ETHOS lab 🧠 was our next visit. For all the archiving nerds (which, if you’re reading this …), Ethos theme this year is, in fact, archiving, but beyond their wonderful public events and workshops, we were lucky to speak with them directly and gain insight and advice on where to look next. And figure out: What is an archive to us really, and how do we build it, both theoretically and practically?
Is fanfiction really worth archiving?
If you’re at this point, not understanding the point of all this, let’s take a step back and return to the purpose 🧘 On a personal and cultural level, fanfiction has had (and continues to have) a massive impact. As with many things belonging mainly to the 🎀girls & gays🎀, and double so if it’s online, fanfiction is often not deemed worthy of being a serious cultural object 🏺But fanfiction is a space to articulate queer desires, discover gender-identities and find like-minded people to share and confide in, and has created a shared internet language that trickles down into any Netflix movie with a 5.2 IMDB rating. Historically, fanfiction has also been a non-capitalistic space of knowledge sharing and cultural production, which in and of itself is remarkable. The fanfiction that has helped create the billion-dollar industry of romantasy novels, is not in and of itself driven by capital wants, but a collective want towards specific tropes and storytelling devices. A wish to express oneself and to create community through fiction. The fanfiction itself is thereby worth archiving, but so is an overall understanding of the community and who makes up the producers of modern internet culture.
If you’re at this point, not understanding the point of all this, let’s take a step back and return to the purpose 🧘 On a personal and cultural level, fanfiction has had (and continues to have) a massive impact. As with many things belonging mainly to the 🎀girls & gays🎀, and double so if it’s online, fanfiction is often not deemed worthy of being a serious cultural object 🏺But fanfiction is a space to articulate queer desires, discover gender-identities and find like-minded people to share and confide in, and has created a shared internet language that trickles down into any Netflix movie with a 5.2 IMDB rating. Historically, fanfiction has also been a non-capitalistic space of knowledge sharing and cultural production, which in and of itself is remarkable. The fanfiction that has helped create the billion-dollar industry of romantasy novels, is not in and of itself driven by capital wants, but a collective want towards specific tropes and storytelling devices. A wish to express oneself and to create community through fiction. The fanfiction itself is thereby worth archiving, but so is an overall understanding of the community and who makes up the producers of modern internet culture.
Anna & Clara
There’s still so much to learn beyond the practical. What is fanfiction even? 😵💫 What was it for those writing in 2005 vs those writing in 2025? 🤔 Right now, we’ve published our Danish fanfiction survey open to both readers and writers, and our next steps are also related to figuring out how to build an archival fanfiction site technically. We’re also doing stuff like this to try to make the project public while it’s a work-in-progress—just like the archive itself will be crowd-sourced, we hope to crowd-source your skills & ideas 🫵