Angstfest, 2003-2013

[eve11]

From my friend who is currently scraping info from Teaspoon:




whofic top 10 overused titles (case sensitive):

sqlite> select count(title) as c, title from story group by title order by c desc limit 10;
27|Home
25|Alone
23|Aftermath
22|Moving On
21|Memories
19|Lost
18|Choices
18|Consequences
18|Forever
18|Hope

I checked; 13 of the 18 labeled "Forever" are Ten and Rose, at least 10 of those seem to be post-Doomsday fics. Ah, fandom. Never change.

Out of curiosity, I checked my stories. There are:

- 6 stories called "Closure", but I think only mine is referencing the mathematical concept (eg, the limit points of all infinite sequences in the set are also members of the set)

- 3 stories labeled "Don't Wander Off": mine (Eleven and the TARDIS), a Ten/Rose PWP BDSM fic (!) and a Nine, Jack and Rose story.

- 3 stories called "Fair Trade" (mine, another Donna story, and a Nine, Jack and Rose story)

- 2 stories called "Resonance" (mine and a story where Ten and Martha meet up with Liz Shaw in 1969)

- 1 other story that also includes "What is Essential" (which is the worst title I've ever thought up, bleh), a Jack/Ianto 450K tome that uses the whole phrase ("What is essential is invisible to the eye") as the title.

So in the aftermath of that, as I sit here with my memories alone in my office, wondering how much productivity I've now lost forever, it appears that the consequences of my title choices are at least mostly unique, I hope. Right, then. Moving on...


ETA: for comparison, here is the top 10 DW titles for ff.net:

51|Forever
42|Alone
39|Memories
37|Nightmares
36|Home
35|Goodbye
33|Run
31|Running
29|Gone
26|Bad Wolf

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, there are (proportionately) more nightmares and running on FF.net, and less hope.

Another Edit: Would you like a bar plot?
There are actually 52 here as I included all story titles with a count of 13 at the end there.

Comments

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

What a list! This is partly why I try to make it a policy that any time I'm tempted to give a story a generic abstract noun for a title, I force myself to stop and reconsider. :)

[nonelvis]

I knew this project would yield amazing results :D

[thisbluespirit]

Ha. I have definitely used Home for a title. Although mine is "Home?" which is obviously completely different from all the ones without a question mark. :lol:

I don't think I've used the others, or at least not for anything more than ficlets. (Consequences is something I would use, though...) I'm not surprised yours are mostly unique; you've used some really great ones.

I'm egotistically even more excited about Teaspoon data! \o/

[giallarhorn.livejournal.com]

Hahahah, I'm seeing that a lot of people seem to focus on the Doctor being alone (or maybe a companion being left behind, etc).

Heh, more nightmares and angst and regrets and all around a much less happy place on FF.net by the looks of it?

[eve11]

Ha, I put up a barplot of the top 50. "Aftermath" is actually the next on the list after "Bad Wolf" for ff.net. I suppose a lot of them are cross-posted, but there are nearly three times as many "Forever"s in ff.net than on Teaspoon.

[eve11]

*in best Vizzini voice* Wait til I get going! :D

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

Ooh, bar graph! :)

[eve11]

Definitely completely different! :D It has a question mark so it's the Jon Nat-Turner-ized version.

I'm egotistically even more excited about Teaspoon data! \o/


Me too! It may lead me to actually learning how to use some graphing software. I have GraphViz on my Mac; I've just never had a project where I felt like doing something with it.

[eve11]

Ha, I did a barplot of the top 50, and "Alone" is #2 for ff.net, but also breaking the top 50 are "You are Not Alone" and "Never Alone", which together *almost* counteract all of the "Alone"s.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Wow, I'm actually kind of surprised there aren't MORE stories called "Rose." Also, I kind of feel like I need to do a title search before I name anything, ever, now. :P

This is really interesting, especially seeing how the top titles line up across sites, and comparing the subjects of similarly titled stories. I wonder if the top titles are similar in different fandoms, to a certain extent, if generic nouns are so popular? Although I imagine what nouns the fandom fixates on would vary by fandom....

[eve11]

I wonder if the top titles are similar in different fandoms, to a certain extent, if generic nouns are so popular? Although I imagine what nouns the fandom fixates on would vary by fandom....

I was just thinking the same thing. Co-worker has given me a link to his bigger db, which includes some other fandoms (Harry Potter, Naruto, and some others I'm blanking on). I can check and see... I bet "Alone" scores high on lots.

[nonelvis]

I can already see from the bar chart you added that I finally match one of the dreaded over-used titles: "Echoes." WHOOPS. At least I never titled (and never will title) any of my stories "Why?".

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Another, unrelated thing in which you can see entertaining things about a fandom, and which I found out about yesterday, is the tags page on the AO3. You can see the parent/child tags for a given tag, but also additional tags that get associated with it and they don't have another way to sort. So on, say, the "Doctor Who (2005)" fandom tag, you have some logical additional tags like "A Town Called Mercy", and "Community: spoiler_song", but also things like "rose is anakin's daughter and leia's sister", "it's not really amy/rory but it's their semi-canonical son so whatever", and "Nine is like a prickly pear". It's my new favorite thing.

[thisbluespirit]

:lol: Yes, Why? is really not something you want to label a fic.

[thisbluespirit]

Absolutely. I'm reassured that most of my DW titles don't seem too predictable, even though I do use one word ones a lot, especially for drabbles & ficlets.

And I have never titled a fic "Why?" or "Spoilers".

I look forward to the results. It should be pretty interesting. :-)

[thisbluespirit]

Hee. I discovered that at the start of this year - it's brilliant, hilarious and occasionally scary. I might have constructed a found poem from the DW ones...

:-)

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Haha, fun!

[aralias.livejournal.com]

i love stats about fanfiction! please do keep going. this is very interesting.

i've managed to avoid making the list by favouring longer titles, clearly.

[honeynoir.livejournal.com]

Ooh, this is super interesting! (I'm intrigued and unsurprised by how Doctor Who? isn't above Her Doctor/My Doctor. *g*)

[eve11]

Ha I imagine "Spoilers" is high due to River's intro and the Matt Smith era. I wonder how many "Why?" fics are in response to The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, since it was a featured question in that ep.

"Doctor Who?" made it on the list. Moffat would be proud. :D

[eve11]

Heh, I have one other bar graph you might be interested in, but I've not put it up in a post yet.

I'm intrigued and unsurprised by how Doctor Who? isn't above Her Doctor/My Doctor.
I think I'm more relieved at that. But I also want to smite the whole "Doctor Who?" question thing with a big smitey stick, so there's that.

[eve11]

Oh my, that is a wall of text! What's the definition for a parent vs. child tag? Does it have to do with co-occurrences?

[eve11]

Now I kind of want to write a fic solely using titles of other stories.

Hm, I should add numbers to the ends of those bars.

[eve11]

Definitely! co-conspirator is scraping all of the review data for me for Teaspoon, as well as who favorites what stories. I'm excited to try and make a good visualization of it :)

I should also grab the recs from Calufrax. I might be able to swing writing that scraper myself. It would just be date and story ID.

[honeynoir.livejournal.com]

That was interesting, yes! o_O I might have guessed five of those and added like forty completely different people. Also, ahahaha wat, definitely thought about four thousand others had written a lot more fic than me.

I just noticed 'Comfort' as a title at the bottom there. I do believe I've used that /ashamed. And, wow, that fic has a surprisingly large amount of hits on AO3 for a fic with such a generic title. (Okay, it's probably because it does sound like a title for fluff/smut, I guess. Still not as bad as that I named a fic 'Six Months Late' without even realising it comes across as babyfic bait and switch...)

Wasn't even thinking about ~The Question, just the name of the show. D'oh! Doctor Whooooo'll be over with s7, probably?

Accurate icon is accurate! ;)

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

I don't exactly know. I want to say it's sort of a degrees of generality branching-tree thing? Like "Rory Williams" is a child of "Doctor Who" is a child of "TV Shows," but I am not sure. wrangletangle is an AO3 tag wrangling journal, and they probably have something about it.

[nonelvis]

Careful how you write that scraper. LJ is picky about how often you can hit their servers -- for example, I tried to set up an IFTTT task to push Calufrax recs to Tumblr, and the nice IFTTT people told me that LJ classified them as a spambot because they liked to check for new data every 15 minutes.

[eve11]

That's good to know. I suppose LJ is a bit tetchy about who looks like they are DDoS-ing their servers.

I can probably go through the archive month by month, with enough wait times to make it look indistinguishable from a human browser unless one looks too closely. Then I can just grab new ones off my flist feed or some such.

[aoife-hime.livejournal.com]

So many statistics! I am simultaneously fascinated and mind-boggled. I've always wondered for certain fandoms what titles show up the most but I've never remotely felt compelled to go through the data to find the answer. This is all very informative and impressive.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Wow...my stuffs is rather diverse title-wise. Now I'm kinda glad they are!!

*Cackles*

[eve11]

but I've never remotely felt compelled to go through the data to find the answer.

I sometimes feel compelled to do so, but usually am stopped by the magnitude of the project of collecting the data. This time around my friend has done the hard parts ;) so all I have to do is mess around in R, which I don't need much of and excuse to do.

[eve11]

Titles are tricky. I over-rely on math/stats for mine, but that has the advantage of being novel to non-math people.

[eve11]

Still not as bad as that I named a fic 'Six Months Late' without even realising it comes across as babyfic bait and switch.

Ha! Well, I rarely rely only on the story title for clicking; seems like caveat lector if they're gonna do that!

[aoife-hime.livejournal.com]

WIN.

If the data was already there and all that had to be done was the actual analysis, that would be a completely different story. That compulsion would probably be a lot more present in that case.

[doctorpancakes.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why anyone doesn't check first to see that their fic titles haven't already been (over)used, though I do appreciate that there are 15 entries for "ginger".

*hugs your fancy data*