Fanfiction writers always look for ways to make their stories more engaging. Analyzing what influences the popularity of fanfiction provides insights into readers' preferences and allows writers to tailor to these. This paper attempts to find linear correlations between fanfiction stories and the emotional journey of their characters. It does so by computationally extracting these journeys from 319 Good Omens fanfiction stories, defining and extracting several features from them and using simple linear regression to determine their correlation to fanfiction popularity. Five features were found to have a significant influence on fanfiction popularity. It was also determined that readers prefer characters that have low emotional fluctuations in their behavior.

The introduction of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) has revolutionised the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and paved the way for many new, exciting large-scale studies for various areas of research. One such field presents itself in the emerging digital literary corpus that is fanfiction, providing research opportunities within the fields of (NLP), Computational (Socio-) Linguistics, the Social Sciences and Digital Humanities. However, because of the unique linguistic characteristics of this literary domain many modern NLP solutions utilizing PLMs encounter difficulties when applied on fanfiction texts. This paper aims to indicate that the performance of various NLP tasks performed by PLMs on fanfiction texts can be improved by applying Domain Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT) to PLMs. A case-study is performed to show that the performance of a BERT-based PLM can be improved for the downstream NLP task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) by applying supervised domain specific fine-tuning. While we gain a 6% increase in F1 score performance, we are sceptical about these results due to the limited amount of annotated data available leading to the model overfitting and show a lack of capacity to generalize to unseen data from the CoNLL NER dataset.

This study investigates how genre preferences and sentiment influence fanfiction popularity across multiple languages, focusing on English, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish datasets. Leveraging advanced natural language processing techniques, including multilingual sentiment analysis, genre classification, and topic modeling, this research explores the interplay between cultural and linguistic factors in storytelling. Preprocessing steps, such as translation and named entity recognition, ensured consistency and reduced noise across the multilingual dataset. Key findings reveal cross-linguistic patterns, such as the popularity of genres like Alter- nate Universe and Romance, alongside cultural distinctions in sentiment and engagement. This work contributes to computational fan studies by demonstrating how linguistic and cultural factors influence storytelling trends and audience preferences in fanfiction.

This paper explores how the portrayal of female characters in fanfiction evolved in response to the #MeToo movement and fourth-wave feminism, with the aim of assessing whether the impact of the awareness of the campaign was broad enough to visibly alter how the average author portrays women in narrative contexts. To analyze these trends, fanfiction data from Archive of Our Own (AO3) spanning 2015–2019 was parsed, and two Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines — Word2Vec and GloVe, and BERT — were developed. The study finds that bias scores, aggregated through formulas created to compare gendered associations, show a stronger stereotypization of women before 2017 compared to after. Furthermore, a similar trend is discovered in the representation of women in fanfiction. While the BERT pipeline proved most effective for capturing contextual nuances, it is significantly limited by its reliance on binary labels and computational intensity. This further indicates the need for more inclusive and sustainable methods, making the Word2Vec/GloVe models more appropriate for this task. The paper concludes with recommendations for future work, including broader representation, longer-term analysis, and enhanced detection of evolving language patterns.

In the scientific community, a few prominent researchers, known as "superstars," receive most of the attention, citations, and resources. However, it is unclear whether they promote true innovation. This study replicates and extends previous work analyzing how superstars influence their collaborators, focusing on the field of computer science. Using the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph dataset, we confirm that while connected researchers in computer science tend to publish more and receive more citations, their ideas are often less innovative. Unlike in the work we replicate, however, we observe this effect even before dissociating the connected researchers from superstars. We also develop a new metric to further clarify the impact of superstars on research diversity. The findings provide insights into the role of superstars in scientific innovation.

This study introduces a new metric for evaluating the disassociation between superstar and non-superstar researchers. Superstar researchers are defined as those in the top 0.1\% by h-index. Leveraging a large dataset, this paper analyzes the data and aims to flatten the discrepancy between superstars and non-superstars, in terms of innovation and popularity. Some authors that publish innovative papers and who haven't collaborated with superstars, tend to be left in the shadows, compared to the ones that have collaborated with superstars from an early stage. The new metric indicates the disassociation between such authors, by factoring in certain parameters that were put into perspective with the help of a Multiple Linear Regression model. The findings reveal significant differences in dissociation scores between researchers and superstar researchers, offering new insights into the dynamics of academic innovation and collaboration. This metric provides a robust tool to identify where an author stands in terms of dissociation and what needs to be done to diminish the discrepancy.

Superstar researchers - those who author research papers which are far more widely cited than average - are generally well-respected within their fields and are frequently sought by new researchers for advice on career development and for collaborations. Though the effect of collaboration with superstar researchers on associated researchers is not well-researched yet, it is believed that collaboration with superstar researchers increases the research output of associated researchers, but may decrease their originality and innovation. This project explores a method of visualizing the career development of researchers associated with superstars. Using a dataset of authors, papers, and paper citations, a graph has been created with papers as edges and nodes as authors to visualize the career development of associate authors after collaboration with a superstar. The utility of this visualization is evaluated using heuristics.