curious about archiving choices

[ratcreature]

I've started to post a bunch of my fanart on AO3 even though sadly you can still only embed art, not upload it, so it's not truly archiving yet. But the advantage is that many of the stories I've illustrated are there and thus I could take advantage of the associations, and also I like having tagging options.

Anyway, I've wondered what to do about drawbles, which for me outnumber "regular" fanart more than 2:1. On dA I put them in the scrapbook so they don't swamp the rest of my gallery, on my website they are in a different section, and in my fanart blog and journals are mostly bundled in a couple of drawble posts after the prompt rounds. But what do you do in an archive like AO3?

On the one hand I'm a completist in the sense that I want to have all my stuff in the places I pick (my personal website shows drawings I did in elementary school -- it's a thing), OTOH I naturally want the art that took a lot of effort to be somewhat more prominent, so that the first impression for visitors is not that I do only sloppy, quick doodles, when they browse my works in a fandom.

So how do you resolve that problem? I assume writers must have similar issues when deciding how to archive quick prompt response fic, drabbles, meme fic and the like. Do you bundle several into a single work? If so by which method? All of one fandom? Or maybe bundle chronologically somehow, like all you did for a prompt post? Some other solution? Or do you just let your other stuff get swamped and trust the audience will sort it out via tags? What's your presentation strategy?

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I've seen people post fic titled something like "X-Men drabbles for June-August" with each drabble as a new chapter.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I think grouping would be good, only I don't do a lot of drawbles for a single fandom in a month. Usually each rounds of drawbles is a kind of mixed bag across fandoms based on prompts I get. But if I grouped drawble rounds as single works the tags would be a mess. But I guess I could make a work like "SGA drawbles" and put each SGA drawble as chapter there, and do the same for every fandom. That would at least work for the larger fandoms.

Argh, sorting things is always hard.

[busaikko]

I put all my drabbles in a "series". This means that they do clutter up my list of works (suddenly, 30 100-word entries! /o\ ) and I sometimes think they'd have been better off as chapters of one WIP entry instead - posting new stuff would boot it to the top of the queue, I think. But that would make the pairings, ratings, etc. into a nonsensical soup....

If you put your drawbles as chapters in one work, I'm not sure whether clicking the "show all chapters on one page" might not be hard to load after X number of entries? You'd probably need several WIPs: Stargate Drawbles, X-Men Drawbles, etc.

[ratcreature]

Each choice has up and downsides. For the large fandoms making one work for all drawbles seems a good idea, only that leaves the problem that many are crossovers and such.

Before trying to fit my stuff on the AO3 I never really appreciated what a practical solution the dA scrapbook is. Like an attic I can just stuff things there and they don't clutter things up, but interested people can still see them. (The only downside of it is that unlike with regular deviations you can't embed the scrapbook pieces from elsewhere.)

[busaikko]

I really hope that when the AO3 does start allowing art to be uploaded, they collect ideas like this to find the optimal way for artworks to be presented. I *think* it could be done by using the CSS for the page to display "portfolios" (like tag bundles, so one might be 'digital art' and one 'drawbles', etc. - erp, sounds like Delicious' new stacks, nevermind). I really need to learn coding >.< because I want to change the way my fic displays as well....

[ratcreature]

Yeah, good art specific presentation would be nice.

I also really hope when it allows to upload art that I'll just be able to click some button for the archive to retrieve and store embedded content from outside locally, so that I won't have to manually upload hundreds of pictures and associate them anew which each of the meta info I already entered.

[sholio]

What I've most commonly seen people do on AO3 is to bundle a group of sketches or drabbles into a single work, and post individual installments as chapters. There was someone in A:tLA, for example, who had her drabbles collected in batches of about 30 or 40 per individual work.

I find this works very well for me as a reader or viewer because, as well as not flooding my reading page, I like to use "view entire work", let the whole thing load, and then see them all at once. But you'd also have the option of viewing one at a time on a slow connection or a small screen.

For my own reading/viewing preference when I'm going through the archive, I prefer to have them separated by fandom, but I can also see grouping them by other criterion (for example, all the drawbles that you did for a particular post on LJ being posted as a single work regardless of fandom); that makes sense to me as well.

[ratcreature]

For browsing and display bundling by fandom seems better, because otherwise the works count in each fandom will go up almost as much as if when you posted separately. Though I'd probably need one just for crossover drawbles. Argh, why is everything always so complicated once you want to sort and structure it?