Strange new worlds: Social content in popular Star Trek fanfiction versus commercial novels.

Abstract

Previous literature has suggested that social cognition benefits of fiction may be related to emotional investment and imaginative engagement with the narrative. Fanfiction, works written by highly invested fans of existing media franchises, might thus demonstrate themes of social cognition, but no studies have yet systematically contrasted the characteristics of fanfiction with comparable commercial works of literature. The present study compares published, commercial Star Trek novels (n = 363) with works of popular Star Trek fanfiction (n = 500) of similar length using 2 methods of language analysis: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software and the Meaning Extraction Method. Together, results showed that fanfiction, compared with commercial novels, are characterized by greater prominence of internal character processes (including emotion and cognitive processes) and social relationships (including romantic, familial, and platonic relationships). This study constitutes the largest to-date study on the characteristics of fanfiction and offers insights into how individuals interact with fiction. Public Policy Relevance StatementCompared with licensed Star Trek novels, unofficial Star Trek fanfiction tends to use more language related to relationships, emotions, and cognitive processes. In line with previous literature that has suggested fiction may simulate social situations, the present findings suggest that fanfiction may offer individuals an opportunity to explore social, emotional, and other introspective skills and that the social cognition benefits of fiction may not be limited to literary fiction.

Big data meets storytelling: using machine learning to predict popular fanfiction

“…In this paper, we focus on research that is fully automated and performed over a large scale. For example, the recent analysis by McCloskey et al is out of scope since its corpus was in the scale of hundreds and because NLP methods were used alongside human inspection (McCloskey et al 2022). Several large-scale, fully automated studies from social computing researchers have investigated fanfiction platforms with respect to community engagement, for example in terms of guiding writers (e.g., mentorship, critical feedback) or fostering solidarity via creative collaborations (e.g., for marginalized groups).…”