Analysing the Demographics of Fan Fiction Communities through the Distribution of a Community Survey

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Lauren Rouse and Mel Stanfill, whose interest is in fan communities on Tumblr. The latest overall demographic information for fandom communities is now ten years old, which is not particularly helpful; the team therefore developed a survey covering user demographics that was distributed via the r/Fanfiction subreddit, Tumblr, and Twitter; fans are still mostly cisgender women, but nonbinary gender identities and bisexual, asexual, and queer sexual orientations now dominate in this community. This is well above global averages, and may point to an overrepresentation of particular groups in survey respondents; similarly, there were 65 of 5,000 respondents who indicated that they had a very rare chronic disease.

Tumblr does have a very strong queer community, however, with high pseudonymity and many interest enclaves (or silosociality); its search functions are poor and its reblogging function results in a non-linear temporality that tends to fragment posts into multiple branches as they circulate. But how might we find groups with particular identities and practices on the platform, then? Are there paired identities; might there be pockets of identities that the survey will encounter as it circulates?

It appears that different age cohorts use specific platforms for engagement with fan fiction, for instance; these practices also generate network clusters that represent particular fan communities or fan fiction interests, and these also correlate with sexual orientation. Further, as the survey circulated, it also captured quite different responses from different geographic regions; and such regional groups also clustered with other demographic factors and fan fiction interests.