Archive Testing, 1... 2... 3...

[icarus]

An Archive Of Our Own is in testing. To help facilitate this, I am slowly uploading fics there and assiduously providing feedback on what works, what doesn't. Hopefully my suggestions are helpful and not too redundant.

Please let the archive know if you note any problems:

Tanlines & Dogtags

First Signs Of Magic: Hermione Granger

A Moment Of Sin

My question for you is on tagging in the An Archive Of Our Own. Yes, it sorts by tags like delicious.

What would you like to see in tags so you can find what you want to read? What makes a good tag? How general should I be? How specific? How much should I customize tags to the content of the story? Is there such thing as "over-tagging"?

For example, for Tanlines & Dogtags I have the tags:

* drama
* pre-slash
* ust
* mild angst
* photography
* art

While for A Moment Of Sin I only used the tag:

* prostitution

I realized, huh, I'm not sure how to do this.

This is in your interest. If I tag badly, it will make it difficult for you to find what you want. It also helps me, so thank you all very much in advance.


ETA: Based on your suggestions, here's what I have for tags: http://archiveofourown.org/en/users/Icarus/profile

Length: shortfic, medium length, longfic, novel length

Character: All prominent characters are listed, even if they're not the main pairing.

Time: season, pre-OotP, where relevant.

Genre: humor, angst, romance, darkfic, drama, crack!fic, au, bdsm, pwp

Pairing generalities: rairpair, crossgen, chan

Story themes to help people beeline their searches: prostitution, polyjuice, photography, gay bar, gun kink, wingfic, crossdressing, non-con, exhibitionism, skinny dipping, etc.

Series name: Primer to the Dark Arts, Beg Me For It, Skinny Dipping, and First Signs of Magic series names (and future series names).

It's clear to me that your ability to filter and find stories will depend upon successful tagging by the authors.

Comments

[elf]

Tags can also be things like "chaptered" or "One shot" or "ficlet." (A word count is included, but only after you've found the story on a list somewhere. Tagging by short/long/etc helps. And "One shot" tells the reader there's no weird cliffhanger involved.) Since tags work cross-fandom, things could be tagged by concepts that are considered irrelevant to that fandom--POV, for example, is not usually mentioned for potterfic, but some fandoms consider it mandatory.

Moment of Sin could be tagged with polyjuice, deception, gay bar, cross-gen, and/or rarepair. Sixth year, perhaps also.

I haven't sorted out how I think AAOOO fics "should" be tagged; all I've decided is that right now, the tags are a damned mess:
# season seven
# season six
# season:three
# season:two
# spn: ep 2.01
# spn: ep 3.04
# spn: season four
# spn: season one
# spn: season three
# spn: season two
# tag: SPN.311.Mystery Spot

I'd suggest looking at the tags page and grabbing as many as are appropriate; they'll work better if a tag brings up all stories that fit, rather than only those the author originally considered that tag to be important for. (If that makes any sense. It's 2am; I really need to get some sleep.)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

So...

- Tag for length (short, long, chaptered, drabble, etc).
- Tag for season/book (season one, or sixth year, etc.)
- Tag for pairing generalities (like rarepair, cross-gen, chan)
- Tag for story genre (humor, angst, romance, darkfic, drama, crack!fic, au, bdsm, pwp)
- Tag for more specific story themes, pulling those from the list where possible (prostitution, polyjuice, photography, gay bar, gun kink, wingfic)

Dancingmoon's right. We already have 215 fandoms on AAOOO. If there's just one fic tagged "drama" per fandom, that tag will bring up 215 stories. That's already not useful. The tags have to be limited within a fandom, and/or within a pairing, and/or within an author's fics.

It's most important to be able to search tags within a specific fandom and specific pairing.

Just Fantasizing

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

[Note that I've never been to the AAOOO site and am just being general here about mechanics and such.]

What'd be useful would be to be able to use tags (and any other delimiters) to narrow a search.

So suppose I'm in the mood for something funny. I go in and enter "humor" in the SEARCH box. I get 16,549 fics which have the "humor" tag. Whoa.

I feel like a short story, so I enter "short" in the box and now I'm down to 13,208 stories -- all of which are tagged "short" or have fewer than 5K words (or whatever limit the maintainers decide on).

That's still too many so now I'll enter "RPS." Now we're down to 3297 stories. Much better, but still too many.

Next I enter "slash." Maybe this isn't actually a tag -- it's a hardcoded field of the story database and when you upload a story you're required to choose one or more of "slash," "femslash," "het" or "gen." Some stories have multiples so you can choose multiples, but every story has to have at least one of these designators. The search function still recognizes those terms and uses them in my sort exactly the same way it uses tags. Now I'm down to 2865 stories, 'cause most RPS is slash.

After all this work, I'm willing to face the fact that a more general search is probably going to give me too much of what I like. I decide I want to jump off from here and search for a number of characters, but not necessarily all at once. I hit the SAVE option and the collection of search terms I've entered so far is saved to my account; I can come back at any time and choose this search in a pull-down menu and end up right back here, with a list of stories (although six months from now there'll probably be 4123 results) which I can either refine further with more search words (without messing up this saved search -- I'd have to explicitly delete it out of my SAVE list to get rid of it) or which I can just browse through and start clicking on stories.

Now that I have this saved, I enter "Harry Sinclair" and get a nice, relatively manageable list of 84 funny, short, RPS slash stories about Harry Sinclair. I scroll down to find something to read. But oops! I find that this list contains a lot of stories where Harry appears; he doesn't even have any lines in some of them.

I hit the BACK button next to the search box and it takes me back up to my previous search result. (I could also have chosen that from my pull-down list, since I saved it, but the BACK button is faster. It only works for my current search, though, so if I do this again next week I'll have to use the pull-down to get back to this search result.)

This time I enter "Main:Harry Sinclair" and I get an even more manageable list of 8 funny, short, RPS slash stories where Harry is one of the main characters. Maybe a bit more manageable than I was hoping for [cough] but that's not the archive's problem. [wry smile]

I'd love to have an archive that worked like this. I hadn't thought of it before, though, in so many words, until you asked your question and I read through the comments and it sort of came to me. :)

Angie

Re: Just Fantasizing

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Appears you're not alone in this. *points down the comment list*

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

I keep waiting for someone, somewhere, to institute Boolean tag searches. I.e.,

harrypotter and ((slash and prostitution) or rentboy) and crossdressing and not hagrid

But I'm pretty sure that's computationally expensive.

[fer-de-lance.livejournal.com]

YES.

Because when I'm looking for a fic I read six months ago, and I remember that it was Harry/Snape and was a prostitute AU, without Draco, I don't want to have to search through 15,000 AUs or 10,000 AUs or 8,000 Snape/Harry fics (a third of which also have Harry/Draco or Snape/Draco) trying to find the one I want; I want to be able to put everything I remember into my searching, to narrow the results as much as possible.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

What they have currently is you can go to the Fandoms page: http://archiveofourown.org/en/media

And from there pick Harry Potter: http://archiveofourown.org/en/fandoms/183/works

Then from there you can filter the tags on the right-hand side. I missed that before.

The trick is, the author has to have tagged their fic "prostitution" for you to find it. This system, it's really up to the author to tag their fics well.

[fer-de-lance.livejournal.com]

Ah, that does help tremendously -- I didn't realise one could search within the fandom page.

It seems kind of... shaky? to me to leave tagging up to the authors; as you mentioned, there's no guarantee that they'll stick anything on there except "drama" and "slash". Do they have a list of all the available tags, like LJ does? Could it be part of the upload process -- the last step being a "Tag This Story" page with the direction, Choose all that apply?

It's going to be fascinating to see the archive kick off and start evolving! I can hardly wait till Tuesday when I'll have time to go and really poke around in it. :D

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I have no idea, but yes, I imagine so. Or else why wouldn't everyone use Boolean tag searches?