Harry Potter Fandom on AO3, Example Analysis

[fffinnagain]

Do we want to use this space to share specific analyses and techniques? To give it a go, here is something I pulled together this week end in answer to a comment by snowgall. I scrapped metadata of all public works under the “Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling” fandom on AO3, to see if there was anything interesting in the number of works and creators posting in

Comments

[snowgall]

This is fantastic, thanks so much! I *knew* that the fandom wasn't in decline :) The Harry/Draco ship seems especially active to me, but as that could easily be personal bias, it's very nice to see some real stats on this. I've posted a link to this post on my blog as well.

I don't have any ideas about November 2009 off the top of my head, but it's a curious thing.

Oh, and I don't mind at all the use of the gender-neutral singular 'they', but for the record, I'm female, so 'she/her' is just fine too.

[fffinnagain]

You're welcome! It was a good questions. I should probably figure out a way to sample AO3 as a whole to get a sense of these patterns in a fandom-independent way... As to the Harry/Draco ship, we can get into that another time.

Thanks for the repost!

[nia_kantorka]

Wow, that's quite impressive. It's lovely to see that our fandom is not only active but growing. :)
It must have been a lot of work, so thanks for analysing the data!

[fffinnagain]

I'm working on streamlining the process, so it's becoming less effort with every fandom I explore. Looking at HP has been very interesting. It's always good to have one's assumptions challenged :)

[vaysh]

These are awesome. Thank you so much for the time you put into this. Will have to look at things more closely, because this is all fascinating stuff.

One point that strikes me is that in part the increase of HP fandom works on AO3 has to do with the growing popularity of AO3 as the go-to archive. I am not sure that it really means an increase of fannish production per se. If you did a similar stat for ff.net, I am pretty certain there would not be such a pronounced increase in HP fanworks.

The New Year's bump is probably owed to the holiday fandom fests, and people posting/reposting their fic after the Reveals. It's really interesting that this highlight of the fannish year shows up in the fic stats, too.

I have no idea what lies behind the November 2009 jump. *ponders*

Just from personal experience (and not statistic hard facts) I totally think you are on to something about the trend towards more cross-fandom works, cross-overs and fusions. I think it goes hand in hand with fans being more multi-fandom.

[snowgall]

Your point about the increase in activity on AO3 reflecting the growing popularity of AO3 is a good one. But I think maybe we can control for this by comparing this sort of data across different fandoms. Indeed, fffinnagain first did this sort of analysis for Sherlock, which is why I asked if they could do it for HP too. If the second HP graph posted above is comparable to the first Sherlock graph I linked to (and I hope it is) then you can see that there is a difference between the two fandoms, with HP showing more recent (relative) activity than Sherlock. So that would be independent of the popularity of AO3. Maybe someone can tell me if I'm reading this incorrectly.

[fffinnagain]

The distinction between activity on AO3 and activity in a Fandom as a whole is very important. And I don't doubt that the growing popularity of AO3 does entice more fans to choose it as a platform for sharing works, however, I am inclined to interpret the growth rate here as suggests that people are continuing to join the fandom, as creators, specifically because of the concentration of short term posters. Like I've seen in the Sherlock fandom, most creators in any short time space are pretty casual, only posting one work. These are mostly fans who get a fresh itch to make a thing and then move on. Only a minority of creators continue to post works for months and years, and I'd expect most of the fans who migrate to AO3 from other platforms are in this category. So the sharp drop in contributors beyond their initial wave is inline with the interpretation that fan creators are still joining the Harry Potter fandom

[mainecoon76]

Wow, this is interesting! Especially the second graph, which tells us how much a fandom profits from new people joining it. Perhaps that's understandable, as there are more ideas to explore when you're new and many fans drift to other fandoms after a while. It would be interesting to see if there's a similar pattern on other fandoms, but I think it likely.

[fffinnagain]

I've seen the same pattern in Sherlock, so now I'm thinking we need to check the trend across AO3. Then comparing fandoms to this common basis will be a lot easier. But I can't scrap all of AO3, so I need to find a reasonable means of sampling it... well that is for another day.

[birdsofshore]

This is wonderfully fascinating. Thank you so much for working on this and sharing your findings. And the pretty charts! I want that colourful one on a t-shirt! :D

[fffinnagain]

Fandom Stats T-Shirts! I'd never thought of that. I love colourful graphs too.