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

[seticat.livejournal.com]

I try to tag all my fic with either 'fic' or 'fanfic'. I'll consolidate that when I figure out how I can get LJ to do that without having to hand change every single one.

I also add the fandom I'm writing in: sga, sg-1, etc.

So far it's working.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oops. I wasn't clear. I meant the tags on http://www.archiveofourown.org/en/users/Icarus

For example, for Tanlines & Dogtags (http://www.archiveofourown.org/en/works/2039) I have the tags:

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

While for A Moment Of Sin (http://www.archiveofourown.org/en/works/1915) I only used the tag:

* prostitution

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

[seticat.livejournal.com]

Oh... doh! Sorry - suffering from 'transiant brain death' right now. I'll think on it, but what you just said is pretty much the way I'd do it.

Maybe if you gave us a list of what you're already using we can toss in additions?

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on how the tags are supposed to work? Will you be able to search a specific fandom + pairing + tag, or does that stuff need to go in the tags? What about age ratings? Right now I could find your fics easily by searching, but if I click a tag all fics with that tag come up. I would like to be able to click forinstance the "photograpy" tag and either first get stuff in the same fandom/author or easily be able to refine my search within the photography tag area. Otherwise tag-to-tag jumping will be very difficult if the archive gets big and to know exactly what words to search for can be a hassle, especially if you add british/US spellings and so.

Basically: Your tags seem pretty okay (though I would maybe add something about younger character or child to First signs of magic) but the set-up with the tags at the site may need some fine-tuning.

[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.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

the set-up with the tags at the site may need some fine-tuning

You're right. I've put in a feedback form, crediting you for your astute observation.

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

Thanks, very nice of you =) I'll probably use the archive as a reader, but I'm too lazy to sign up and give proper feedback and stuff right now.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

They're still limiting the accounts to people who gave them feedback and suggestions in the first round. I think they don't want to be flooded with fic while in beta.

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

Ah, even better then!

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

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

i feel that nothing i say will be useful because i'm so stupid about this, but here goes.

the way i use existing archives, the most important thing for me is the author and the pairing. length is nice because that's the other limiting factor -- sometimes i want an epic to get lost in, sometimes i need something short.

everything else is secondary to that.

i also do need some warnings, but my ironclad squicks are quite rare and fall into things that most people agree "deserve" warnings...

i also always love the violence warnings and need them more than the explicit content warnings. always. and of course my squick lies at the intersection of sex and violence, so....

i have a feeling that the way the archive is approaching tagging might be a huge mess. but i am no expert. there's two ways of looking at it which I guess are designed to operate independently -- author generated tags and reader or reccer tags. and never the twain shall meet.

but even the author generated tags are so stylistically different already that it's going to be a big mess, i fear.

but again: I know very little about the theory of tagging and have never used delicious at all, so there.

thanks for being a pioneer for us, though.

[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.

[elizabeth-rice.livejournal.com]

On this page: http://archiveofourown.org/en/users/Icarus/works, there is a 'Filter Stories' box on the right-hand side. The 'Filter Stories' box is a quick search tool for searching within your works.

If you look closely, you'll see that your tags have not shown up. I'm guessing that that's because any tag that has only one use will not show up in that box.

So when you are defining your tags, you need to remember to make them specific, relevant, and universal (a keyword that a reader will think of too). They must not be general and avoid using synonyms. Your tags need to be reader-friendly.

Eg, for Tanlines, photography (or rather photograph) is good. You have also written a Harry/Ron story revolving around a Wizarding photograph. So the same 'photograph' tag can be used here too.

I'm just guessing here. So try this. Let's see if I'm right about this and if your 'photograph' tag shows up then.

PS: I'm right. I just tested this with my own stories. Each tag has to have more than one use to show up in the 'Filter Stories' box.

This means I need to revise my tags too.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I see the filter stories now. It doesn't work for me at all. No menu appears.

But it's not because of my tags. I didn't list all of them here, and most have more than one use -- for example, drama, ust, and the other tags that I used for Tanlines & Dogtags. I checked, and prostitution has two uses in the database (the other is a Supernatural story).

Here's my guess, which may be what you mean: the filter is for stories within one author? So if I post that Harry/Ron fic, I'll have two with the photography tag.

Yes, I see what you mean. Let me try that and see what happens.

[elizabeth-rice.livejournal.com]

This also applies to each rating, fandom, category and warning tag.

Don't worry about tagging all of your stories because readers can still search for them according to fandom (within your own page).

[elizabeth-rice.livejournal.com]

the filter is for stories within one author?
Yes, that's what I mean. The filter is in two places: http://archiveofourown.org/en/works and under each author. I'm only talking about the latter.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Welll... I've written, oh, 130 Harry Potter fics I think? And about 35 SG-1, and roughly 50 SGA.

I'd better be systematic with the tags.

[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 see it now. I'd ignored that whole "filtering thing" even though it was exactly what I needed. Well. That was one useless suggestion I sent to the Archive coders last night. I hope they don't hurt themselves rolling their eyes.

I should probably print out a list of my stories and write a list of tags for each. That will help me be consistent and thorough in my tagging.

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

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

[elizabeth-rice.livejournal.com]

And I've read nearly all of them. :D

Even if I don't know anything about the canon, if the fanfiction is fun then I'll read it. I read Original Yaoi/Slash, so that's how I treat them till I start watching/reading the canon.

[elizabeth-rice.livejournal.com]

I think I read in their community they're waiting to release their FAQ where they'll explain their features in detail.

Heh, I wrote to tell them they should use a standardised tagging system without realising that this way is so much better.

Really, they ought to explain somewhere that the tags are created by the author for the specific use of that particular author. They won't get so many people telling them why their current system wouldn't work. :)

That's a good list you've got there.

On LJ, I have defined tags by challenge, fandom, length and series.

In addition, genre is always useful. Time/timeline tags sound good but beyond pre- and post-series tags I wouldn't know how to use this one. Manga plots are divided into arcs so I could make use of that.

Now pairing, pairing generalities and themes/content - I'm not going to use those. I don't even rate my stories anymore. Too many people have used such tags against the writers.

I read a lot of Original Yaoi/Slash. What the authors do is they put up only a 1-5 paragraph summary and the genre itself is Original Yaoi. They don't use any other warnings or tags (unless they have spent a considerable amount of time in a fandom before). And ratings not at all. Well, yaoi is only applied to explicit stuff.

Anyway, I intend to give readers a full summary, in lieu of content warnings. I just hope readers would accept my decision.

It's clear to me that everyone's ability to filter and find stories will depend upon successful tagging by the authors.
I can't even rate my own fics.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I can't even rate my own fics.

Oh, really? I can't see why not.

My rating system works like this;

Detailed description of cocks, etc., and what is inserted in where, and full frontal nudity = NC-17

(If I ever wrote violence of the Rambo variety with detailed descriptions of the bloody stumps = NC-17 .)

The same scene with the camera, so to speak, focused on the kissing and the emotional content; no description of cocks, what is inserted where is left to the readers' imagination = R

(Violence where the carnage occurs off-screen and the camera focuses on the emotional fall-out = R.)

Sexual content of the non-inserting variety, kissing, sexual talk, adult situations = PG-13

Everything else = PG

Then certain subjects I tend to bump up a rating. Prostitution, discussion of off-screen rape, incest, chan, will be moved up from PG-13 to R.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Really? Oh, that's cool. *g*

[elizabeth-rice.livejournal.com]

One of my betas did explain the rating system to me before. I still hesitate.

You have explained it well. It sounds so simple on paper but when I try to apply them - confusion.

None of my stuff is higher than an R and half of them feel like they belong to the Young Adult section.

So I decided to follow the book format: title, summary, genre (optional). Less headache for me.

Re: Just Fantasizing

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

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

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

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

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Warnings are a different category, built into the system (including a warning that states "chooses not to warn"). So that's one thing I don't have to worry about.

I've added length to my tags. I hadn't thought of that.

but even the author generated tags are so stylistically different already that it's going to be a big mess, i fear.

It looks messy to me, too. Seems they've chosen flexibility over structure by choosing to use tags.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

This is how it was explained to me by Connie when I was trying to make NC-17 scenes in Primer to the Dark Arts conform to Fiction Alley's R-rating. She told me think of it as a camera. What does the camera show?

[elizabeth-rice.livejournal.com]

But that's just the problem.

I'm writing a story. It's not a movie, a video or even an image. It's words. Every reader's experience may be different. Every reader may imagine, visualise, or picture the story or novel differently.

So how can I imagine a camera and use a movie rating system?

There is the rating system that bookstores and libraries use: general, young adults and adults.

But I don't know how a publisher decides which story is Young Adults and which is Adults only. I don't know the criteria.

I have no intention of misleading any reader. I will provide a full summary (and maybe genre) for my future stories so there shouldn't be any room for misunderstandings.

I will do everything that I can to inform a potential reader of the kind of story s/he is about to read. Beyond that, it's out of my control.

[ca-pierson.livejournal.com]

Pairing generalities: rairpair, crossgen, chan

I'm sorry, but I don't know what 'rairpair' means.

Otherwise I'm a firm believer that 'too many tags' is an urban legend. That is, as long as you can search them properly. I've been around the archive only twice and I like the way it's set up. The list of tags gets a tad long sometimes and at least in SGA I don't see why there should be a John Sheppard/Rodney McKay and a mcshep pairing. Unless it's standardized to some degree redundancies will occur and it'll render the archive pretty much useless in my eyes, because - tell me if I'm mistaken - if I click both mcshep and John Sheppard/Rodney McKay I'll only get the stories that have both tags? Not the stories that have either of the tags?

Another thing that I found rather stumping is, that when I like look for SGA, John Sheppard/Rodney McKay and then try to refine by tags I happen to sometimes get 0 returns even though it says there's 2 of these tags present. So I'm thinking these numbers are based on the whole fandom and will only come in handy once there's more archived there. When I have a fandom with 10.000 stories of which 5.000 are in my pairing chances are I'll at least get a few returns . . . I guess.

Hmm, sorry, babbling here :) I'll stop now.