"I really have no idea what non-fandom people do with their lives," A multimodal and corpus-based analysis of fanfiction.

Fandom is a growing phenomenon in the contemporary user-generated mediascape, inasmuch as it is capitalizing on the unprecedented possibilities of publication, distribution and interaction made available by digital technologies (Hellekson, Busse 2006; Stein, Busse 2012). In transmedia storytelling, integral elements of a story are dispersed systematically across various delivery channels with the goal of creating a networked entertainment experience (Jenkins 2006, 2007). Stories are no longer experienced through linear narratives, but they are accessed through several “points of entries” that encourage a customized reading/viewing/writing practice: the global fanfiction experience. Fanfiction is explored of this study from two distinct but complementary theoretical and methodological standpoints. Building on previous studies on the matter (Thomas 2010; Sindoni 2013) and drawing on a mono-generic corpus, LJFic, the research questions that this paper addresses deal with diatypic variation (Halliday 1991) in fanfiction from both linguistic and multimodal perspectives. Keyness analyses have been carried out using two different reference corpora (FLOB and COCA), assuming that such analyses can shed light on a range of linguistic issues, for example with regard to spoken/written variation (approximating Biber’s MF/MD analysis, 1988) and with a focus on the most prominent lexical items for the investigation of the entries’ aboutness (Scott, Tribble 2006; Bondi, Scott 2010). However, a purely computational analysis cannot account for the multimodal nature of fanfiction. To fill this gap, a sample of entries will be analysed qualitatively, by unearthing and unpacking the multimodal resources involved.