icon so appropriate you don't even KNOW
So systems (after much begging and harassing on my part) has installed a timeline extension on fanlore and \o/ I am having so much fun YOU GUYS. Here's my biggest work to date, a timeline of major slashed sources, and I say my, but it's basically just plugging in the chart above, compiled by many many people who are not me.
Okay, it doesn't look like much but one) the syntax is fiendish, as you'll see if you poke around, and there's not much to choose from in timeline extensions. But I think it does sort of give a bit of perspective, spread out like that, visually. I mean, no wonder Star Trek had such a huge impact: for five years afterward there was nothing else. Well, obviously there were other things, but none that managed to garner a big enough fannish response. And look how thick with fandoms the early eighties was, and how thin it got in the late eighties and early nineties.
Again, part of this could just be holes in the data, but isn't it fascinating?
Naturally, I'm now trying to think of other things I could graph, and, well, I want to make a graph of fandoms-that-ate-fandom, but. One) Is there even a name for it? You know what I mean, right? The fandom that comes out of nowhere at the opportune moment, and suddenly all these lynch-pin fans are moving onto greener pastures in droves from all the fandoms and everyone is staggering around going "Wait, what? Where did everyone go?" From my perspective it's been Harry Potter, then Smallville, and apparently still Stargate Atlantis, going by the growth of fanlore. Poor Smallville has one tiny article that no one is filling out.
But that's very subjective, obviously, and I'm trying to think of a way of measuring objectively, or even semi-objectively, the rise and fall of fandoms. It seems nearly impossible, because I know X-Files was once huge, but any heuristic that would capture X-Files would miss, for example, SGA, because the internet of X-Files and the internet of SGA have the same kinship relationship as a mollusk and a pterodactyl.
Hmm, obviously at one point I thought I was going to have a Two) Guess not.
Okay, it doesn't look like much but one) the syntax is fiendish, as you'll see if you poke around, and there's not much to choose from in timeline extensions. But I think it does sort of give a bit of perspective, spread out like that, visually. I mean, no wonder Star Trek had such a huge impact: for five years afterward there was nothing else. Well, obviously there were other things, but none that managed to garner a big enough fannish response. And look how thick with fandoms the early eighties was, and how thin it got in the late eighties and early nineties.
Again, part of this could just be holes in the data, but isn't it fascinating?
Naturally, I'm now trying to think of other things I could graph, and, well, I want to make a graph of fandoms-that-ate-fandom, but. One) Is there even a name for it? You know what I mean, right? The fandom that comes out of nowhere at the opportune moment, and suddenly all these lynch-pin fans are moving onto greener pastures in droves from all the fandoms and everyone is staggering around going "Wait, what? Where did everyone go?" From my perspective it's been Harry Potter, then Smallville, and apparently still Stargate Atlantis, going by the growth of fanlore. Poor Smallville has one tiny article that no one is filling out.
But that's very subjective, obviously, and I'm trying to think of a way of measuring objectively, or even semi-objectively, the rise and fall of fandoms. It seems nearly impossible, because I know X-Files was once huge, but any heuristic that would capture X-Files would miss, for example, SGA, because the internet of X-Files and the internet of SGA have the same kinship relationship as a mollusk and a pterodactyl.
Hmm, obviously at one point I thought I was going to have a Two) Guess not.