(no subject)

[eve11]

Note to self: When randomly selecting a series of stories to look up on ff.net, arrange them randomly as well, so if 2/3 of the way through you decide that 200 is plenty big enough of a sample size than 300, you can just stop, as opposed to having to finish looking up the rest.

I am trying to figure out if stories that don't bother listing characters, have basically the same distribution of characters as those that do list characters. There are over 11,000 stories that don't list any characters (about 25% of all of the stories in the db). So I randomly selected 300 of these and am using either the description or a skimming of the story to determine the characters. Then I will compare distributions. Of course my data provider has all of the characters listed numerically with the names in a lookup table. I've been going chronologically--came across a few stories I recognized: Astrogirl's story about the end of the world and the Doctor drinking tea, Calapine's story about Rose perhaps not wanting to find out about more companions, "Watson's Ghost" by Camilla Sandman... and oh my goodness a bunch of 'spork my eyes out' stories too. So, you might be able to guess, I've now so far got several numeric character sets memorized:

1267
1267,1279
1267,1279,590
490,1267
490,590
490,665

Rose
Rose, 9
Rose, 9, Jack
10, Rose
10, Jack
10, Master


Also, it is kind of frightening how many stories I honestly can't tell which Doctor they're writing about.

ETA: 222 in to my chronologically ordered sample, I've got my first 1267,820 femmeslash story! (That would be Rose/Donna). Woot, thanks NetgirlY2K ;D

Comments

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Also, it is kind of frightening how many stories I honestly can't tell which Doctor they're writing about.

Hmm, that could be a mark of really terrible writing, or it could say something about the enduring traits of the character. Given that you're on ff.net, though, I am inclined to go with the first one. :P

[aralias.livejournal.com]

this is interesting stuff! i look forward to more posts about ff.net. i was vaguely astonished when i went over, prompted by your first post, and saw that Who is the third most popular TV fandom (with over 10,000 more stories than on teaspoon). i had no idea it was so popular. also, the ones you flagged up in that post are insanely popular by LJ or teaspoon standards.

any idea why people don't list characters, btw? are they old stories before that was feature was introduced, or is it just that people are lazy? because... presumably your fic is never going to be found if it doesn't have characters listed.

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

As one of the authors listed, I can say that mine are definitely old stories from before that feature was introduced. Having largely given up on ff.net since then, I'm not going back to change them. :)

[aralias.livejournal.com]

thanks!

did they roll the feature out at different times for different fandoms then? because it was definitely around when i was writing potter fic in the early 2000s. or were they just very slow to recognise that who was a fandom people were going to write in? (i am now taking you, quite unfairly, as the authority on new who tagging on ff.net).

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

Hmm, actually, I just went and looked, and least some of my stories, mostly the more recently uploaded ones, do have characters listed. Which... I totally didn't remember. But it looks like maybe that does depend on the fandom? The Who ones uploaded after mid-2007 mostly seem to have characters listed, but the B7 ones don't.

I don't know, though. I haven't updated anything there since 2009.

[eve11]

see my reply to aralias below for a preliminary answer.

[eve11]

I am working on a post about that. I have some tables and a graph of the distribution of Publication Dates for the stories with 0 characters listed ("unlisted") vs. at least one character listed ("listed"). It seems like the newer writers (11th era) are much more likely to tag their stories, and that a disproportionate amount of the unlisted stories are 10th era.

Can you tell me, is there a limit to the number of characters one can list? Almost every story that has listed characters has 1 or 2 listed and that is it. On the other hand, in the 300 I sampled from the unlisted, I saw a lot of eg, "Jack, Nine and Rose" or a bunch of pairings listed in the description. There were a lot that didn't officially list characters but put the pairings ("10Rose" or "10/Jack". etc) in the description text.

[aralias.livejournal.com]

oooh. graph. excellent. it's interesting that so many stories continued to be untagged once tagging became an option...

as for how many characters you could list... i have no idea how it is any more, but i'm pretty sure that back in around 2002-04 when i was on ff.net out you could only list a maximum two characters i.e. the two main ones. that may have changed since, as it was a vaguely stupid system for anything other than pairing fics.

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

Astrogirl's story about the end of the world and the Doctor drinking tea

And here I was, just reading along, wondering idly whether any of mine might randomly show up in there! Well, glad to contribute to your data!

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

LOL!! Wow...the spork my eyes out tales - there always seems to be a lot of them. Think I actually have one of those in my list of offerings. Tis the Pit, everyone has to have at least one bad one there. *CACKLES*

Yeesh...

[eve11]

There were some "spork my eyes out" stories, but then also just some strange ones too. For example, in my random sample of a measley 300 out of the 11850 stories with no listed characters, I came across two different "Doctor Who/My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" crossovers. At least one of which was actually really well-written and cute. But I think both of them were post-2010 and I could not tell for the life of me which doctor they had poni-fied. I did a Google image search and figured that Ten was probably the correct answer in both stories, but it is still a guess, because both 10 and 11 have pretty prominent "Dr. Whooves" pics.

A very simple scaling of proportions (2/300 = x/11850) suggests that there are about 80 DW/MLP crossovers lurking in the set of DW stories with unlisted characters. I did a search for 3 prominent MLP characters ("Fluttershy", "Pinkie Pie", "Twilight Sparkle") in the set of DW stories with Listed Characters, and got 0 results!

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

That's what is so odd, really - the high rate of 'OMG-which-Doctor?!' Seems the ones with no characters, X-overs, etc - are just poorly crammed in with no regard to warnings.

Loving these statistics, though. So, so weird...look for it, can't find it. Throw a dart, find a handful!

*HUGS*

[clocketpatch]

I feel like there's a while parallel fandom going on over there...

Third most popular is a surprise. I'd expect it in the top ten, but third? (what were the first two? Star Trek? Supernatural? Sherlock?) I have noticed that basically everyone at my workplace knows what the TARDIS is and understands the basic concept of the show whether they watch it or not, but mine is an exceptionally nerdy workplace so I'm not really certain how representative it is of the population at large.

[eve11]

It is only 3rd most popular in TV shows. The anime has it beat by far (eg, I looked up anime and the top show is Naruto which has over 300,000 stories; DW has 45,000). But the two more popular shows are apparently Glee and Supernatural.

I mean, Glee? GLEE? It's only been on for not quite 4 years! It has nearly twice as many stories archived than Doctor Who. Wow.

ETA: and as evidenced by this whole project and how it came about, heh, my workplace is obv. extremely nerdy as well ;)