This dissertation presents a study of Poeter.se, a Swedish web community for reading and writing poetry. The aim is to examine and analyze how a literary community online works, how the writers present themselves as authors and how conventions connected to poetry migrate into or are negotiated in the digital environment. The vast amount of material published on the website during the time-period 2003-2016 (2 million comments and about 860 000 poems) makes it imperative to raise questions about methodology and the dissertation highlights how a researcher dealing with digital material can combine methods. 

The study is divided into six chapters in which I use different theoretical frameworks, such as the concept of digital paratexts, theories and discussions about the function of the author in a digital media landscape, and media-specific theories about how reading and writing can be approached when they occur online. The central research questions are: What characterizes the connection between genre-specific traits in poetry and the digital platform on which they are published? What kind of relations can be seen between the participants and their publication patterns, and the website? How do the members present their writing and their participation at the site?