Another matter entirely, you guys: I need your help (with a university project)
I’m writing a term paper in Linguistics and I’m going be writing it about…fanfiction. And I need something from you: Your Fanfiction.
Basically, I’m going to collect hopefully (DEPENDS ON YOU!) a whole lot of fanfiction, collect them and compare these samples to the original works they’re based on and try to come to some sort of conclusion about the degree to which fanfiction writers imitate the style of the original work and to which degree there’s a style that’s particular to the fanfiction-community.
So for that…I need fanfiction. And I’m looking particular for shorter stuff, between 10k and 20k words, because if I include giant works of 500.000 words, I would have one writers style (no matter how beautiful it might be!) dominate my statistics, so I want to have as much similar stuff per author.
I’m also looking for stuff that’s written about books, specifically, because obviously, I want to compare writing.
Currently the fandoms I’m looking at are:
Les Miserables (anything written about the brick, not about the musical)
Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit
I’m open to any other suggestion, as long as there’s a lot of fanfiction about it
Material. (Also it needs to be in English)
Data. Your Data. Which I’m going to sell to the Chinese government. Obviously.
No. Okay, the thing is: there’s a lot of fanfiction online, but if I want to compile a corpus, it always helps to have some data on whose sample I’m using, just so that I can draw conclusion, like for example whether Americans write their Harry Potter Fanfiction with a British spelling or whether British people adopt American spelling or what non-native speakers do or speakers of other varieties of English etc.
So the whole point I’m bothering you is:
If you write fanfiction to one of the aforementioned works (and your fanfiction focusses on the written version and not the movie) and would allow me to use it (not for any profit and I’m not going to say it’s good or bad or anything and neither is my professor or anyone, in fact, they’re not going to read it and I hope to get a lot so it’ll basically impossible for me to read it all) but if you allow me to use it I love you and would probably pat your head and marry your dog or the other way around if you would send me a link.
Please send it to this blog: @fanfiction-corpus
Best drop the link into the chat and add the personal data (I’ll specify a bit further on in this post, but it’s completely anonymous, I just want to have some data on the samples I’m using!). If you have any questions, use the ask function of the blog and I’ll answer them as quickly as possible.
Don’t attach it here because I don’t want to have a 20 mile post that no one reblogs
Okay what should you send me except your fanfiction?
Whether you’re a native English speaker (+ which variety)
whether you grew up bilingual or have a different (which?) native language
And at which age you learnt English and when you started writing for the fandom/how much you write/if you write a lot for other fandoms.
If you feel uncomfortable including one or two of these for whatever reason, that’s perfectly okay (although a blank slate…helps me less)
I solemnly swear that I won’t use any of this for profit (I legally can’t, since I’m including the copyrighted originals in my Corpus as well so JK Rowling would personally behead me if I did.)
“But what do I get out of it?”
Aside from Kudos? Not much, really. Sadly I’m not too active in any of these fandoms, but obviously I’ll have my nose pretty deep in your writing so what you might get out of this is…maybe a nice review/comment when I find the time? A rec? A shout-out? I know it isn’t much because this will be a lot of work, but you would really help me a lot.