10 Years of Sherlock (TV) AO3 stats!Sherlock fans, new and old, click below to read a long lis
10 Years of Sherlock (TV) AO3 stats!Sherlock fans, new and old, click below to read a long list of graphs and comments about our communities fanworks over the last 10 years. I scraped AO3 again and demonstrate that:More creators are writing longer works in 2020Readers engaged more as the fandom changed after S4Top ten new tags per year for the last 10 yearsAnd a lot more. PS the code to gather this data and analyse it can be found way over here. Activity over 10 yearsThe last 10 years in the BBC Sherlock fandom have been tumultuous, but this community persists, with engagement from new fans and continued creative output. To commemorate over a decade of squee, I’ve done another scrape of the fandom’s imprint on the Archive of Our Own and will share some insights from the numbers in these plots. A very late update on my post S4 snapshot from 2018.Note: This analysis is of completed public fanworks only, about 101000 of the 122000 Sherlock (TV) works available at present. This is to remove the late WIP effect, which adds a bulge to the last few months, and out of respect to creators who wish to have their material reserved for other registered AO3 users.The works are still comingCounting the number of works posted per day, we can see the peaks associated with each series airing (in UK and US). After that, the number of works continues fairly evenly, 20-30 per day, plus seasonal peaks. This rate is continuing on without a hint of new canon in sight. So who is posting all this work?Creator-waves, monthly outputYears ago I started plotting creator waves, basically I group fanwork producers by the year they first posted to the fandom and then count how many of this group are active in later time intervals. This lets us get a sense of how long people are contributing and whether new fans are getting the urge to create. This plot of the Sherlock (TV) fanworks on AO3 shows the standard shape of plump participation in the first year of any given set of creators, followed by a slowly thinning tail as they because less active over time. Turnover is natural in fandoms, with most only posting a work or two within a fairly limited amount of time, while a precious few persist for years. The surprise for me here is that the ratio of new creators is higher in 2020 than it was in 2019. Maybe the excuse of lockdown encouraged more folks to take a turn at creating content. Another way to look at the output of fan creators on AO3 is to see the total amount of words being shared across all fanworks. The total has been pretty close to 300-400k words per month since 2018! To get a sense of what that means per work, I also plotted the median number of words per fanwork in these monthly sets. The median in higher in the last year than it had been staying for a while. Reader behaviour: Hits & Kudos & CommentsFan creators are only part of the story. Stats on engagement are a bit trick to interpret, I’ve got some plots here that tell us something about how works have been engaged with over time. The obvious first to consider is Hits. Above is the total number of Hits given to works published each month. This is the current totals, not a historical snapshot, so we have a very strong bias towards early works, what we might call the Classics Effect. Works that have been around longer have had the chance to be seen by more people, and in particular those works that become must-read classics in a fandom, extending their exposure through prominence in top ranked works and recommendations. To cut down on the advantage of the classics, we can also consider median hits per work for each month. As most works get a lot attention when they are first posted and then fade out of sight, the median number of hits reflects instead the ratio of readers to creators, basically how many eyeballs are around to look at the latest work, regardless of status. The median plot shows how the hyper-visibility of the few work available before 2012, and then a more steady curve once the fandom had gotten established on the platform after Series 2. Amazingly, the hit rate for the median work was steady through the big bumps in activity with later series, a 1000 hits for median works between 2013 and 2018, followed by a slow decline. I’d expect the 2020 works to continue gaining for a few months yet, but the median is probably 50-60% of what is was when the show was in production.Kudos counts and medians show a similar story to hits, but there is a dip down around 2013 for kudos reflects the frenzy of productivity that saw the fandom grow during the Series 2 hiatus. Readers were getting spoiled! From the airing of Series 3 (2014) until a year following Series 4 (2018), the median work received an even 60ish kudos and 1000 hits, a niche audience that decreased to 50/750 through 2018-2019. The numbers of 2020 suggest a smaller community of readers again, though these numbers may still rise a bit in the next few months before the median works are forgotten. The statistic that tells a different story is Comments. Looking at the total comments counts, there isn’t a drop after Series 3 (2014). Instead, the fandom compensated for changing numbers with more feedback and discussion attached to works. This is reflected in the median comment rate as well, which shows seasonal variation but doesn’t really drop off until 2020.It’s remarkable that without fresh canon we continue to have new creators contributing to the fandom, and while that may be outpacing the readership somewhat, the standard of engagement has been very high. One could say the fandom is chugging along quite nicely!What about TagsSo, with all that turnover and shifting population, is there a change in the kinds of works being posted? We can look at tags, all tags and freeform tags, to see if there were any meaningful trends. First up, I did a creator-wave like analysis of works just for tags, to see how tags continue to be used after being introduced. Unlike the creators, tags clearly persist for years. After 2015, it looks like the core tag set has been established, with very few tags persisting in usage per subsequent year.This graph reports numbers over time that are not proportional to the number of works or creators active. Instead, works on AO3 have been getting more and more tags over the years, with the average steadily growing from 5 in 2011 to 15 in 2020, with freeform tags (not characters or ships) from 2 to 8.To get a sense of fic and tagging culture changes over time, I counted the most popular NEW tags of each year (wave). Note: this analysis is using exact matches, not the networked associations of tag meanings wrangled into AO3 today, so some things that pop up aren’t new concepts but instead newly popular TAGs for whatever they represent. 2011: 2752 (First year, so all solid stuff, tags that continue to be popular forever)Angst 323Fluff 232Humor 216Hurt/Comfort 188Romance 168Friendship 168Crossover 138Crack 121Alternate Universe 119First Time 1062012: 11637 (still early, first references to Series 2)Fluff and Angst 145Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall 97Kid Sherlock 54Puppies 50Sad 48Episode: s02e01 A Scandal in Belgravia 47Mathematics 42Season 2 spoilers 38Omega Verse 38Feels 382013: 16176 (Omegaverse nomenclature is growing, Top/Bottom terminology, new challenges)Alpha Sherlock 65Omega John 6130 Day OTP Challenge 59Tumblr: letswritesherlock 56Top John 49Sherlock Holmes Returns after Reichenbach 44Bottom Sherlock 40Reichenbach Angst 30Don’t copy work to another site 29Age Regression/De-Aging 272014: 19256 (Mostly Series 3 relatedEpisode: s03e03 His Last Vow 249Episode: s03e02 The Sign of Three 167Post-His Last Vow 149His Last Vow Spoilers 142Sherlock Series 3 Spoilers 1282000 AU 100The Sign of Three Spoilers 74Fatlock 72Post-The Sign of Three 66Post-Season/Series 03 572015: 14272 (New challenges, new prominent Sherlolly tags)Chats 47International Fanworks Day 2015 34Watson’s Woes July Writing Prompts 2015 27S3 referenced 25Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper Kissing 22English Accent 22Sound cloud 19Eventual Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper 19Protective John Watson 18but not that kind of graphic 172016: 13517 (New stylistic tagging, TAB references, a lot of epilepsy?)Slowwww burn 92John Watson Loves Sherlock Holmes 37Sherlock Holmes Loves John Watson 33post-tab 30JME 27Post TAB 25Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy 23Sherlolly Appreciation Week 2016 19epileptic 19fraternal love 172017: 15067 (Series 4 tags and challenges)Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective 133Episode: s04e01 The Six Thatchers 93Post TFP 73Sherlock Series 4 Spoilers 69Episode: s04e03 The Final Problem 60Post-Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective 55Sherlolly Appreciation Week 2017 50Post S4 48Sherstrade Month 2017 4431 Days of Porn Challenge 2017 412018: 10733 (Lost of new challenges, seasonal and weekly)Towel Day 2018 64Mystrade Valentines Calendar 2018 25Kinktober 2018 23Pregnant Molly Hooper 23Soft Smut Sunday 23Tom Robbins 23Sherlolly Appreciation Week 2018 21Inktober 2018 20established universe 16Always1895 162019: 7785 (More prompts, and character attitudes)Sherlolly Appreciation Week 2019 25221B Autumn Challenge 21A-Z Christmas Prompt 19KatsJohnlockXmas2019 16Whumptober 11Poor Greg Lestrade 11Kinktober 2019 10Dissonance 10John Watson is a Good Friend 9Sleepy Sherlock Holmes 82020: 8074 (Not all COVID related, thank heavens)Mystrade Monday 59COVID-19 48Coronavirus 46Mystrade Monday Prompts 40Whumptober 2020 36warning for a covid-19 setting 33Flufftober prompts 2020 24Do Not Translate 24they’re all right they’re just at home 23Granada Sherlolly 21A little note from looking across all freeform tags, not just the new ones, we see a curious pattern with regards to two actions: First Kiss and Anal Sex. They appear amongst the most common tags as of 2014, neck in neck for two years, than Anal Sex drops off the top ten in 2016. From there out, First Kiss stays in the top 5 from that point on, while anal sex appears at rank 9 from 2017-2019 and is gone again in 2020. This probably says something about the fandom, somehow. Bravo for making it to the end and thank you for reading! Questions/comments welcome. -- source link
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