pondering fanfiction numbers
I argued with someone on tumblr who said the quantity of fanfic produced has starkly decreased since 2009, but while I was sure they were wrong I couldn't back myself up with hard evidence. Luckily their main argument was "these days there's nothing as active as Stargate Atlantis fandom used to be", which was pretty easy to refute.
Beyond that specific conversation, I'm wondering if there's been any studies of fanfic/fanwork volume over time, or if there's any way to estimate even a rough ballpark. It would be interesting to even just see changes within a specific community over time, eg Jane Austen fandom after various adaptations. Or comparing numbers within different archives, like fanfiction.net vs AO3. But the AO3 is the only archive I've come across which makes it easy to look back on past numbers for that sort of thing, and it's too young and unevenly popular to be a reliable sample.
I find poking at these sorts of numbers fun, I think I might do it some more. Fans constantly make sweeping statements with zero intellectual rigour. And intellectual rigour is important, dammit! Plus it's fun to just ask an interesting question and find out the answer. I appreciate it when people with a history/media studies etc degree add some Actual Facts to these conversations, and I feel like there's numerical data holes I could fill. For a start, noone seems to be very interested in analysing femslash and fanart, which are two things I'm into and could poke at.
I have massive imposter syndrome about whether I'd actually add anything to the conversation, though, and about my qualifications to do this sort of analysis accurately. I studied just enough stats at uni to be aware of how much stats I don't know, and my training is all in abstract mathematics etc, not...sociology?? I don't even know the right discipline. But I do have a computational mathematics phd and worked as a data analyst for a while, which is a hell of a lot more qualification than I have to analyse media etc, which I certainly pontificate about plenty. I guess since I haven't studied any humanities at all it's easier to coast by on a comforting wave of Dunning Kruger ignorance of my ignorance.
Anyway, even if I just have fun and noone else finds this stuff interesting or useful, it's just nice to feel interested in doing something vaguely mathsy again. The awfulness of my phd followed by declining health getting me fired from a sequence of science related jobs, combined with brainfog, has rather sucked the joy out of maths and science for me for the last ten years or so, when it used to be what I intended to devote my life to.
If I do end up poking at fandom stats some more I should look into existing methodoloogy for analysing social group numbers methodically. Not that they gave me any training in that sort of thing when I crunched medical data for the Health department, but back then I wasn't the one deciding what numbers to crunch. As it happens a friend with a sociology degree is coming over tonight, I could ask him, though he can be a bit Smug Mansplainy Arts Graduate.
So, things to do:
Read through the links on this post
Refresh my decades old statistics knowledge
Have a proper look at what toastystats is and isn't doing, since she seems to be the most visible person analysing this stuff at the moment.
Actually one thing I might be good at is writing up methods so other people can do their own analysis. If I learned one thing during my maths phd it's that I am, at best, a middling mathematician, but I'm not bad as a science communicator.
Also: while I was looking around for the tumblr thing I came across the fact that about every second fanfiction.net story ends up deleted??
Also, I love the fandom choice in the sentence "Now, it might not seem substantial, but Twilight with its 150,000 uploads may have up to 2000 dead stories counted as alive every day"
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/720634.html. There are
comments.
Beyond that specific conversation, I'm wondering if there's been any studies of fanfic/fanwork volume over time, or if there's any way to estimate even a rough ballpark. It would be interesting to even just see changes within a specific community over time, eg Jane Austen fandom after various adaptations. Or comparing numbers within different archives, like fanfiction.net vs AO3. But the AO3 is the only archive I've come across which makes it easy to look back on past numbers for that sort of thing, and it's too young and unevenly popular to be a reliable sample.
I find poking at these sorts of numbers fun, I think I might do it some more. Fans constantly make sweeping statements with zero intellectual rigour. And intellectual rigour is important, dammit! Plus it's fun to just ask an interesting question and find out the answer. I appreciate it when people with a history/media studies etc degree add some Actual Facts to these conversations, and I feel like there's numerical data holes I could fill. For a start, noone seems to be very interested in analysing femslash and fanart, which are two things I'm into and could poke at.
I have massive imposter syndrome about whether I'd actually add anything to the conversation, though, and about my qualifications to do this sort of analysis accurately. I studied just enough stats at uni to be aware of how much stats I don't know, and my training is all in abstract mathematics etc, not...sociology?? I don't even know the right discipline. But I do have a computational mathematics phd and worked as a data analyst for a while, which is a hell of a lot more qualification than I have to analyse media etc, which I certainly pontificate about plenty. I guess since I haven't studied any humanities at all it's easier to coast by on a comforting wave of Dunning Kruger ignorance of my ignorance.
Anyway, even if I just have fun and noone else finds this stuff interesting or useful, it's just nice to feel interested in doing something vaguely mathsy again. The awfulness of my phd followed by declining health getting me fired from a sequence of science related jobs, combined with brainfog, has rather sucked the joy out of maths and science for me for the last ten years or so, when it used to be what I intended to devote my life to.
If I do end up poking at fandom stats some more I should look into existing methodoloogy for analysing social group numbers methodically. Not that they gave me any training in that sort of thing when I crunched medical data for the Health department, but back then I wasn't the one deciding what numbers to crunch. As it happens a friend with a sociology degree is coming over tonight, I could ask him, though he can be a bit Smug Mansplainy Arts Graduate.
So, things to do:
Read through the links on this post
Refresh my decades old statistics knowledge
Have a proper look at what toastystats is and isn't doing, since she seems to be the most visible person analysing this stuff at the moment.
Actually one thing I might be good at is writing up methods so other people can do their own analysis. If I learned one thing during my maths phd it's that I am, at best, a middling mathematician, but I'm not bad as a science communicator.
Also: while I was looking around for the tumblr thing I came across the fact that about every second fanfiction.net story ends up deleted??
Also, I love the fandom choice in the sentence "Now, it might not seem substantial, but Twilight with its 150,000 uploads may have up to 2000 dead stories counted as alive every day"
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/720634.html. There are
comments.