IDW Transformers Fanfiction - Writers Census
A little fun add-on to my big Ao3 TF Fanfic datacrunch project from last year, in honor of Ao3′s new people search!
the data: this is coming from running a “search for persons” with no fields filled out except the fandom set for IDW Transformers. That gives us the names, total # of works and # of IDW TF works for every account/pseudonym that’s written for IDW Transformers.
caveats about the data: this is breaking it down by pseudonym, not by accounts or writers. Folks with multiple pseudonyms/accounts will be counted multiple times. 👍 Also, while the search tells me there’s 1030 hits, when I actually scraped the data I only got 871 unique names, with a number of them duplicated. So either Ao3 is bad at counting, I am bad at copy/pasting or there’s some 200 folks who are missing from this dataset.
you can see the full dataset here in case you want to pull any information from it or run analyses of your own
First up: There are 871 writers in our dataset. How many IDW TF fics did each of them write?
[image: Number of IDW TF works as a scatter plot, sorted by pseudonym alphabetically. Most pseuds have 0-5 works, but there are outliers mostly in the 40-100 range, with a far outlier of 250]
Hrmph. Well, it’s kinda hard to read that chart. Let’s make it a pie chart for easier readability:
[image: Number of pseuds within a range of work counts. 40% wrote 1 TF fic, 37% wrote 2-5, 9.5% wrote 6-10, 8.8% wrote 11-25, 1.6% wrote 26-50 and 2.2% wrote more than 50]
Cool! But are those writers mostly writing IDW TF? Or is that a small part of their larger oeuvre?
[image: Number of IDW TF works plotted against total number of works as a scatter plot. We can see that a small percentage of writers are on the 1:1 line, but that for writers with more than ~5 works they tend to have works outside the fandom. Our far outliers have written more than 500 works total, but between 20-200 IDW TF works.]
Huh, well, that’s probably to be expected. So what percentage of each pseud’s works are within the IDW TF category?
[image: A histogram of number of pseuds vs percent of works in IDW TF. The majority of pseuds are either 0-20% IDW TF or 50-60%.
160 are <10%, 135 10-20%, 95 20-30%, 66 30-40%, 35 40-50%, 106 50-60%, 40 60-70%, 25 70-80%, 39 80-90%, and 11 90-100%]
BUT! That chart is deceiving. The last bucket is 90-100 exclusive, meaning we’re not counting anybody who uploaded only IDW TF works. It turns out there are 159 pseuds who’d only uploaded IDW TF.
[image: Histogram from above with 100% bucket added in at a count of 159.]
Which means of our 354 pseuds with one IDW TF work, 93 are pseuds whose sole work is that one IDW TF work.
[image: Bar graph showing 354 pseuds with 1 IDW work vs 93 pseuds whose sole work is IDW TF]
And of our 159 psueds that are 100% IDW TF, 93 of them are our pseuds whose sole work is IDW TF. (Meaning there are 66 pseuds who’ve published 100% IDW TF but have multiple works)
[image: Bar graph showing 93 pseuds whose sole work is IDW TF vs 159 pseuds who’ve written 100% IDW TF]
Well, this has been fun! (for me, anyways) One last piece of data i can get out of this limited dataset is who our most prolific writers are. Remember, this is counting number of works, not looking at wordcount. So someone with one 300,000 word fic counts as 1. 👍
[image: Scatter plot showing the 25 writers/pseuds with the most IDW TF works. They are:
hellkitty 242, ladydragon76 193, MagicRobot 98, Kuukkeli 97, CavalierConvoy 86, GunTotingScienceNerd 83, Bubonicc 76, prowlish 76, thoughtsdemise 75, bexacaust 70, vienn_peridot 69, eyemeohmy 68, charivari 67, Decepticonsensual 62, dracoqueen22 61, Darety 56, Baneberry 54, cndrow 53, Apricots_from_Nara 52, Owlix 48, GreyLiliy 47, starvonnie 46, Bibliotecaria_D 44, pl2363 38, spockandawe 33
As a reminder, you can find more ridiculous charts at my old 6 part census of TF fanfiction on ao3!
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
gummygunk
izzy806
