Statistics on the acd_holmesfest exchange over the past 6 rounds

[garonne]

TL;DR: acd_holmesfest participants tend to produce PG-rated fic in the range 2000-4000 words, with a slight preference for M/M fic (almost exclusively Holmes/Watson) over gen fic, but with more gen fic than fandom in general.

Inspired by billiethepoet's recent analysis of the holmestice fic exchange, I did a purely descriptive statistical analysis of the contributions

Comments

[sanguinity]

Never any femslash? What? Just looking at what's been cross-posted to AO3, we have 20 works for which the author has ticked the F/F box, thirteen of which have a femslash pairing as their only pairing.

Or did I misunderstand something?

[scfrankles]

Sorry to butt in ^^" garonne is analysing acd_holmesfest here, not holmestice ^^

[sanguinity]

You would not believe the trouble I have distinguishing those two by name! Or perhaps you would. :-)

Thank you for the correction, and I withdraw my very confused comment.

[garonne]

You had me worried there for a second! Though it would have been pretty hard to miss such a large number of f/f fics in this fest :)

[scfrankles]

This is so interesting - thank you for putting it together!

I must admit what surprised me the most was the number of works submitted over the individual rounds. The first round I got involved in (just as a reader) was no. 4 - I hadn't realised there had been a particularly large number of works that time. I'd thought the number of participants had been going down since then - which they have, but now I see the number of works last round is still higher than at the beginning ^^

Also, surprised at the percentage of gen but not surprised at the percentage of H/W ^^ (And I now feel rather proud to have contributed to the "other pairings".) Incidentally, though no f/f pairings have been in the headers, I can think of at least 2 ACD Holmesfest fics that have included them within the story (in both cases, they involved OCs). I think they probably weren't listed in the headers so as not to give away plot points.

[garonne]

Actually, I finished this a week or so ago, but didn't post it straight away, because I was convinced I'd read several f/f stories in acd_holmesfest (and in fact there's some implicit f/f in one of the fics I received myself, tweedisgood's Fair Hearts of Finest Glow), but they just weren't coming up in my analysis, no matter how often I double-checked. I ended up concluding that they must have been in holmestice instead. Actually the smart thing to do would have been to look at the acd_holmesfest collection on AO3, now that I think about it :)

Anyway, glad you found it interesting. It was fun to do!

[tweedisgood]

I was just going to say, I'm fairly sure most of the f/f contained in acd_holmesfest was written by yours truly.

See also Written on Sand from Round 4

The A03 collection only includes a minority of the fest fics, unfortunately.

Just consulting with the other mods about your question btw

[tripleransom]

Good point, Tweed - I know I need to get on the stick and post my contributions to AO3 - it's mostly just not taking the time to do it.

[stgulik]

Fantastic! It's what we suspected, but it's cool to have the numbers to back it up. Your analysis is readable and so are your charts. What's the learning curve like on Python?

[garonne]

Hard to answer because I'm not sure what kind of background you have! But if you've got some previous programming experience, it's ridiculously easy to get started with Python. As in, a tiny fraction of the time you'd need to pick up the basics of something like C++ or Java. I guess after skimming a few 'introduction to python' pages you could already get started with one of the huge number of 'web-scraping with python' tutorials out there. And that bit's very easy. I didn't actually know anything about web-scraping before I did this, but I just read a few short introductions like this one.

For someone who has no previous programming experience, however, the learning curve's pretty steep, because you'd need to understand all the basic programming constructs (variables, loops, functions etc.) before being able to do any web-scraping.

[tripleransom]

Thank you so much for this most interesting analysis. For me, the most interesting chart was the variation in the number of works submitted in the different rounds.

[garonne]

Glad you found it interesting! Yeah, I really hadn't noticed such huge variations in the number of works during the actual posting of each round...

[saki101]

Thank you for these statistics and their colourful presentation! It is interesting to see the variations over time. I was surprised by the word count statistics.

[garonne]

Glad you enjoyed reading! I was surprised myself... I had thought the average wordcount was a little higher.