Introducing the Thai Drama AO3 Trends Dashboard! (Beta) 🇹🇭
Over the last several weeks or so I've been building an auto-scraping setup to get AO3 stats on Thai Drama fandoms. Now I finally have it ready to share out!
Take a look if you're interested and let me know what you think :)
(More details and process info under the cut.)
Main Features
This dashboard pulls in data about the quantity of Thai Drama fics over time.
Using filters, it allows you to break that data down by drama, fandom size, air date, and a select number of MyDramaList tags.
You can also see which fandoms have had the most new fics added on a weekly basis, plus the growth as a percentage of the total.
My hope is that this will make it easier to compare Thai Drama fandoms as a collective and pick out trends that otherwise might be difficult to see in an all-AO3 dataset.
Process
Okay -- now for the crunchy stuff...
Scraping 🔎
Welcome to the most over-complicated Google Sheets spreadsheet ever made.
I used Google Sheets formulas to scrape certain info from each Thai Drama tag, and then I wrote some app scripts to refresh the data once a day. There are 5 second breaks between the refreshes for each fandom to avoid overwhelming AO3's servers.
Archiving 📁
Once all the data is scraped, it gets transferred to a different Archive spreadsheet that feeds directly into the data dashboard. The dashboard will update automatically when new data is added to the spreadsheet, so I don't have to do anything manually.
Show Metadata 📊
I decided to be extra and use a (currently unofficial) MyDramaList API to pull in data about each show, such as the year it came out and the MDL tags associated with it. Fun! I might pull in even more info in the future if the mood strikes me.
Bonus - Pan-Fandom AO3 Search
Do you ever find it a bit tedious to have like, 15 different tabs open for the shows you're currently reading fic for?
While making this dash, I also put together this insane URL that basically serves as a "feed" for any and all new Thai drama fics. You can check it out here! It could be useful if you like checking for new fics in multiple fandoms at once. :)
Other Notes
Consider this dashboard the "beta" version -- please let me know if you notice anything that looks off. Also let me know if there are any fandoms missing! Thanks for checking it out!
The inspiration for this dashboard came from @ao3-anonymous 's AO3 Fandom Trend Analysis Dashboard, which I used as a jumping off point for my own data dash. Please give them some love <3
