Adding Diversity to the Hugo Awards

[daveon]

One of the claims the various puppies have made is they're getting more works into consideration for the Hugo Awards...  I thought this was an interesting claim, especially given the effectiveness of a strong slate, so I thought I'd look at the data.  I can only find details back to 2011, anybody who has links to the earlier nomination data, I'd

Comments

[despotliz]

I have data going back to 2009 in a spreadsheet, and some stuff back to 2005 in more scattered form - it's all on the pages for each year linked from the Hugo history page.

When you say number of works nominated, you mean number of works which are in the extended stats, right? Unfortunately all they have to do is list at least the top 5 works or ones which got more than 15%, so all we can really say from these stats is that the nominations may be getting slightly more spread out and slightly fewer items are hitting the 5% threshold. Here's a graph of top 20 nominees from the past 6 years:
http://i.imgur.com/3uys3Lv.png
and it's actually pretty consistent what proportion of the vote the top nominees are getting, even as voter numbers increase. Except for dramatic presentation, which is really weird (I've truncated the scale at 50%, but in BDP you get films nominated by >50% of nominators).

I don't think there's that much historical data on total number of works nominated in a category, although there's a few scattered bits and pieces in the stats in recent years. Looking at novel, in 2015 we have 1827 ballots and 587 works,in 2014 there were 1595 ballots and 648 works, in 2013 there were 1113 ballots and 475 works, and in 2009 639 ballots and 335 works.

[daveon]

There isn't that much on the total nominations but I've found it for 3 years which was interesting, and I'll pull things out in a later post.

The Novel category stays remarkably consistent in relation to the number of people nominating. That's probably why it's harder to completely game.

The Short Story categories? Yeah, the more people involved the easier it is for a relatively small number of people doing the same thing to own them... that is assuming that the majority are voting according to their interests.

The number of short stories up for consideration is actually going down relative to the number of voters which I wasn't expecting. The Novels are staying more or less the same.