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destinationtoast · 8 years ago

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Some notes on my fandom stats.

I sometimes get questions or criticism regarding my fandom stats. (I welcome both.) Sometimes critics have missed something that I clearly stated in the post, but often, criticism indicates that I could be doing a better job explaining something. So this is an attempt to explain what fandom data can and can’t show, where I’m personally coming from, and what I’m intending my analyses to do.

This is a v1 attempt -- please give feedback about where I can further clarify! I'll be continuing to revise and update based on responses, so please click through to the original post.

The most common critiques I get fall into a few broad categories:

Incorrect or misleading. Some of my methods/stats/visualizations are wrong, misleading, or don’t match up with someone’s personal experience. (See “My goals,” “The limitations of my ability to issue corrections,” and “How you can help with limitations in existing analyses”)

Wrong focus. I don’t do enough stats about some important topics -- e.g., race. (See “The limitations of my methods” and “How you can help with limitations in existing analyses”)

Not representative. I’m overgeneralizing about fandom and misrepresenting fans by only looking at certain fanworks or by failing to give important context. (See “The limitations of focusing primarily on AO3”)

Overly authoritative. I’m speaking as an authority on fandom and acting as if my stats are The Truth. (See “My goals” and “What fandom stats can and can’t tell us”)

Agenda-driven. I’m using stats to try to justify fandom practices that some people disagree with, such as creating fanworks primarily about men or white characters -- or else I’m using stats to harangue fans into behaving differently, e.g. leaving more comments on fic. (See “The Toast agenda”)

I’ll try to explain where I’m coming from and address some of the most common criticisms here, but if you have more questions or concerns, please pass them along.

My goals

My fandom analysis posts are intended as fanworks -- by a fan, for other fans. Meaning that:

I’m assuming the audience has personal experience in fandom and goodwill toward fans.

While I sometimes have beta readers, these are imperfect works, put together in my spare time.

These are shared out of love for fandom and other fans, and because I think other fans will be interested, rather than to further my career.

As some possibly useful context, I didn’t even mean to end up making a bunch of fandom stats posts in the first place. But when I was curious about fanworks and made a few graphs mostly for myself, other fans turned out to be really interested. So I’ve kept on sharing what I’ve learned as I’ve continued to be curious. And I started a dedicated stats sideblog because some fans who aren't interested in the other content on my main blog asked me to.

I do the best I can to be accurate and clear in my fandom stats posts. But I sometimes make errors in analysis, gather unrepresentative data, fail to give context, present something unclearly, etc. I really appreciate feedback from people who want to engage in thoughtful critique or ask questions when they spot issues with my work. It’s my goal to always update & correct/clarify my posts as I continue to learn more.

I don’t have plans to publish any of my work for a broader audience, or an academic audience. I have a separate career that doesn’t have to do with fan studies, and I do this for fun in my spare time… I think trying to rewrite for a different audience and publish things via official channels would sap a lot of my desire to do it. When I’ve shared things at cons, they’ve been fan conventions, not academic conferences, and I’ve been there because fans expressed interest in hearing me talk about some of my stuff.

(Note: this doesn’t mean I don’t think fandom analysis can be worth publishing, or worth having a career in! And I’m happy to share data and methodology with academics or other interested parties, and to have them redo the analyses/do similar analyses & present the results to other audiences.)

It’s possible I sometimes sound like I’m writing/speaking as An Authority On Fandom, but that’s not my intent. In fact, in fandom I rarely feel like an expert -- because I haven’t actually been active in the online fannish community for all that long, and I only have personal experience with a pretty narrow range of fandoms, fannish platforms, and fannish experiences. I strongly value hearing the experiences and opinions of other fans.

The limitations of my methods

I tend to do analyses of fanworks only, and I analyze aggregate metadata (e.g., number of uses of tags) about large amounts of fanworks at once (thousands or millions of works). That means I’m not looking at any individual works. Those are good techniques for answering questions like:

Which ratings are most common on AO3?

Which are the most common fandoms, characters, or ships?

How has that changed over time?

How many kudos do different AO3 tags get?

What are the most popular genres on Fanfiction.net?

Sometimes I also compare data between archives (AO3, FFN, Wattpad), or look at fandom tagging activity on sites like Tumblr or DeviantART. And occasionally I get access to a bunch of data taken from a site like IMDB and incorporate that, as well.

These methods/data sets have limitations:

I haven’t hand-categorized the data. There may be errors.

I’m relying on other people to tell me what’s in their fanworks, so anything that’s not in the tags, my methods don’t catch.

Different people sometimes use the same tags differently, and I usually can’t detect that, either. I assume that this usually just adds noise to my large data sets, but I also try to think about any systematic biases that might be introduced and to highlight them in my writeups.

I can’t add new information, like a character’s race, country of origin, canonical (a)sexuality when known, etc. Neither AO3 nor FFN specify these attributes (although fans can and do sometimes create tags like “Canon Character of Color” or “Canon Asexual Character,” so to the extent that fans widely use these tags, I can do analyses). I would really love to have data about race and other factors not in the tags; if you have ideas how to get it, I'd be grateful.

I can’t answer anything about the creators of the fanworks (e.g., demographics).

These are the methods that I am personally best equipped to do (in terms of tools, skills, experience). I’ve enjoyed learning some new methods as part of doing these posts, but I’m definitely not good at everything. So when my methods can’t provide the right data for someone’s question, it doesn’t mean the question is unanswerable, but I might not be the best person to answer the question. See “How you can help with limitations in existing analyses” for more information.

The limitations of focusing mostly on AO3

I use AO3 a lot because:

it has the most flexible and best organized tagging system

it's easiest to search, sort, and filter

it already gives you a bunch of stats in the Sort & Filter sidebar, whenever you select a particular tag or combination of tags

I have now written a bunch of scripts to help me quickly get data from AO3

I have the best intuitions about AO3, because I use it the most, so I can do a better job catching errors in my work there

That doesn’t mean I think AO3 contains all fanworks or is representative of all fandom/fanworks. It’s only one home of many for fanworks, and it’s got a lot of unusual characteristics. For instance, because it was founded to provide a home to works that were considered sensitive or banned on other archives (explicit works, RPF, slash, etc.), it tends to have more of these kinds of works than many archives. Initially, I didn’t tend to point this out and overgeneralized about fanworks from AO3. These days I try to point out the limitations in generalizing. (Though I do still find it interesting to learn about AO3 as an archive!)

The limitations of my ability to issue corrections

One good aspect of Tumblr is the way that it can reach broad audiences beyond one’s immediate followers. However, the same easy reblogging that leads to this broad circulation comes with frustrations. Even if I update the original post with corrections or clarifications, the old version of the post often continues to circulate. Another difficulty is that not everyone sees the same conversation thread, so I often end up responding to the same concerns from a whole bunch of different people who aren’t seeing my response to others in different reblog branches.

There’s not that much to be done about this, but readers might want to keep in mind that what they see cross their dash is often not the latest version. You can usually find my latest updates by clicking through to the original post.

How you can help with limitations in existing analyses

I wish I could do more stats about understudied topics like race in fanworks using my methods, and I wish others were studying these topics more, too. Fortunately, my methods are not the only methods, and I am not the only one doing analyses. As one great example, if you are interested in how race factors into fandom demographics or into shipping, I strongly recommend @centrumlumina . They’ve done a demographics survey of 10K AO3 users and annual stats about the most common ships on AO3 (with hand-categorization of race).

There are many other great fandom stats folks as well (I’ve amassed an incomplete list). If none of us have answered the questions you are interested in, I encourage you to try to answer questions yourself! A lot of what I do is not actually very complicated (seriously, a lot of it is just doing a search on AO3 and writing down the number of results, or clicking on a tag and writing down the number of results) -- and there are some fan-made tools to help.

As one starting point, I recommend taking a look at the tools at fandomstats.org. I collaborated with @annathecrow and @esgibter to help fans do some types of quick stats -- right now only on AO3, but we welcome help broadening that! I’ve also written some tutorials on gathering data, and as part of my fandom stats posts I generally share my raw data, which you are free to use to dig into my work further/continue the effort.

Time permitting, I am also happy to answer questions and help you brainstorm how to do your own analyses.

What fandom stats can and can’t tell us

I don't think my fandom stats tell deep truths about fandom. They can provide some insights into some aspects of fanworks: what kinds of fanworks exist on different platforms; how fans are using metadata (tags, etc.); how reader/consumer response to fanworks; etc. But trying to figure out what exactly that data means, and why fans are producing/consuming the things they are, is beyond the scope of the numbers. So is determining the direction of cause and effect between variables that seem related (and ascertaining whether there are hidden underlying causes).

It’s additionally important to keep in mind that the results of fandom stats depend on the questions asked and the types of analyses done. There isn't any one right way to analyze data (there are sometimes bad ways to do it, but often several good ways). Different ways of looking at data tell you different things. Even a good analyst can only see part of the story, depending on what they think to ask, and how. My goals are to clearly explain my thought processes and methods in gathering data, doing analyses, and presenting the results -- in large part so other people can spot potential issues with my assumptions and methods. I always welcome suggestions for follow up work or clarifications, when people think there is more to the story.

A final point: I don’t ascribe any moral judgments to my fandom stats -- that is, I don't intend to imply any opinions about whether fans are doing good or bad things. You can form your own opinions from the numbers, or use them to support arguments. But I try to keep any opinions or judgments out of my stats posts (though I may sometimes share them in other meta).

The Toast agenda

I’m not setting out to prove anything when I do an analysis -- I’m motivated by curiosity (or sometimes a desire to help other fans answer questions or find rarer fanworks). I’m also never setting out to justify (or argue against) any fan behaviors. As I said above, I don’t think fandom stats data can answer questions like “Is it right/good for fans to do [X]?”

A few of my personal tenets regarding data and its role in discourse:

The answer to almost every interesting question about fandom (or any complex system) is “It’s complicated/nuanced, and the answer depends on the details of how you ask the question.” I try to explain my starting assumptions and to map out some of the complexity of the data, where I can. There’s always more to the story, though.

There are many reasons that groups of people do things. We shouldn’t ever look for just one reason. I don’t like questions like, “Is there so much fanfic written about white cis men because of bias in media or bias in fandom?” -- I don’t think it’s an either/or, nor are those the only possible factors. My own data gathering is not an attempt to support either side of such arguments.

For example, there are strong systemic biases in my society (US) based on race, gender, sexuality, class, size, ability, and other factors. This leads to, among other things, a lack of balanced representation in media, and a tendency to privilege certain kinds of storytelling narratives over others. Both media creators and fan creators (and fan consumers) exist in this same stew of biases, and we're all affected by them. This makes it unlikely that only one of these groups is responsible for phenomena like lack of representation in fanworks.

Data is good food for thought and discussion fodder, but can't tell us what to do.

It’s also the case that I have opinions about lots of things. Nobody is truly impartial. When I set out to gather data and test hypotheses, I try not to let my own beliefs or assumptions bias my conclusions, and I am often surprised by what I find in the data -- but it’s unavoidable that my own worldview influences the questions I think to ask and other factors in the analyses I do.

A few facts that may affect my methods, assumptions, and blind spots:

I’m white.

I’m a cis woman.

I’m queer, and I have identified as queer/bisexual for my entire adult life (~20 years).

I’m poly, and I have been in poly relationships for almost my entire adult life.

I live in the US.

I’ve always lived in suburbs or cities.

I’ve always been financially secure.

I’m not religious or spiritual.

I’m liberal to extremely liberal on most political issues.

I have academic background in science.

I work in tech.

As an adult, I’ve mostly been active in the Sherlock fandom, since 2013. I previously read some fanfic in the Harry Potter fandom in ~2005-2008. When I was a teen (mostly pre-internet), I was producing fanfic and fanart (for just me and my friends) in the Star Trek and Peter Gabriel/Genesis fandoms.

I write queer fiction of many stripes -- fanfic (mostly M/M and/or queer poly) and original (mostly F/F and/or queer poly). A lot of it is mature or explicit, and occasionally kinky.

I write het.

I write gen.

I’ve written RPF and self-insert stories.

I love a lot of problematic media. I’m happy both loving it and critiquing it.

I’m in favor of more people (and more diverse people) writing stories, and I’m fine with people writing any kind of fiction that they want to. I’m also in favor of having critical discussions about storytelling, and getting creators to think critically about the kinds of stories they are and are not contributing to the world.

Whew -- thanks for reading! :) Another fact about me is that I’m strongly in favor of self-examination and self-improvement. I’m always striving to do better, and I welcome feedback on my fandom stats, on these notes, or on anything else.

Edit: Thanks to @flourish and @fffinnagain for some insightful feedback on earlier drafts of some sections of this post. All errors and issues are mine!

#my stuff #fandom stats #toastystats #philosophy of data science #ish #FAQ #reference #50

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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago

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Hyperallergic: Selling Sticks and a Slap in the Face: Artists Intervene in eBay

Megan Hildebrandt, “ANXIETY DISORDER FOR SALE,” #exstrange auction (all images courtesy #exstrange)

Editor’s note: This essay is excerpted from the book #exstrange: a curatorial intervention on eBay, in which seven writers consider critical artistic perspectives on and provocations within the online market.

The sweet dream of a commercial marketplace doubling as a space for community and connection is an old one. We imagine the Ancient Agora of Athens, for instance, as a place where merchants peddled goods and citizens swapped political ideas. Perhaps this was even true.

By comparison, eBay seems more coldly mercantile. Its creation story, which involved the founder wanting to help his fiancée trade Pez dispensers with like-minded collectors, has only the flimsiest link to human connection — and is in any case a myth invented by publicists. The real goal of eBay’s inventors was to devise a “perfect market,” in the pure and uncluttered sense of matching buyers and sellers with zero friction. The Pez yarn may have contributed to somewhat condescending early assessments of eBay as little more than a digital flea market. Today, of course, it is a multinational ecommerce giant, facilitating all manner of transactions in dozens of countries.

But either way, why not take the flea market seriously? The fifth episode of Robert Hughes’s famous 1980 documentary series The Shock of the New memorably sees the critic striding through one in Paris, bellowing about the Surrealists, who had found inspiration in such settings and their “endless profusion of battling objects” in the early 20th century. “The flea market was like the unconscious mind of capitalism,” Hughes booms; artists prowled the sales stalls to mine connections from the seemingly impersonal goods on offer, revealing “secret affinities” within a world that their work “declassified.” And then the curators of #exstrange, Marialaura Ghidini and Rebekah Modrak, showed up in eBay’s infinite flea market with a different, but not unrelated, intent: to set up shop.

The selling of goods and services, in this context, would serve as a “pretense,” as Modrak put it, for facilitating exchanges among strangers — borrowing sociologist Georg Simmel’s take on the “stranger” as a “mobile figure who circulates goods.” And thus, through more than 100 auctions, involving dozens of artists (and non-artists), #exstrange joined and added to the commodity conversation, simultaneously cacophonous and silent, happening on one of our most familiar online agoras.

To take one example of what this looked like, consider “Stick—with history of affordance,” listed by Fieldfaring, the collaborative name used by artists Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves. Like many #exstrange listings, it inspires a second look at the familiar eBay format, suddenly made noteworthy. For all its slick, global might, eBay’s aesthetic remains a bit of a mess. Pre-formatted text is cluttered by logos for payment-service options and social-media tools to promote whatever is for sale. The designated photo box is the main wild card: the sales image, whether seductively professional or alarmingly amateur, sets the visual tone. In this case, it’s a workaday picture of three sticks.

Fieldfaring, image from “Stick—With History of Affordance,” #exstrange auction

“When our son was in primary school,” the listing reads in part, “he would often have these sticks with him when we picked him up after school. He found them in the trees by the schoolyard and played with them at recess-time as make-believe firearms.” And yes, now that you say it, they do look sorta kinda like guns, particularly through the imagined eyes of an imaginative child. Bidders are invited to choose one stick, accompanied by “the memory of its original affordance,” as well as an acknowledgment that the buyer may add his or her own. The stick attracted 26 bids and sold for $71.

Possibly the winner was familiar with psychologist James J. Gibson’s “Theory of Affordances,” defining them as “action possibilities” in an object or environment; or Donald Norman’s subsequent adoption of that term in the context of human-object interaction in the book The Design of Everyday Things; or contemporary philosophical discussions of object-oriented ontology, where it’s not unheard of to encounter the affordance idea applied specifically to the action possibilities of a humble stick as an illustrative example.

But possibly not. Ebay sellers slot their auctions into eBay’s category schema, to make them easier for shoppers to discover, and in this case the artists listed their object under “Entertainment Memorabilia,” more typically represented by movie-prop replicas, concert T-shirts, and all manner of celebrity-autographed objects.

It’s a good example of the multiple ways that #exstrange aims to disrupt — to use a word popular among internet capitalists — assumptions about commercial exchange, virtual connection, and the contexts in which art can live, among other familiar paradigms. Characterizing their enterprise as a “curatorial project,” the organizers of #exstrange used eBay to obliterate the physical, geographic, and ideological norms that define, for instance, a gallery exhibition. Participants contributed listings/works from Austria, India, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico City, North Carolina, Brooklyn, Rome, Amsterdam, Ann Arbor, and so on. Some were recruited by Ghidini and Modrak, others by curators they brought into the project; still more joined in after the auctions got underway, building on an open call for engagement. (“Any artist, designer or eBay account holder may post an auction using the tag #exstrange and following the set of instructions posted here,” the project’s home site explained.) The volume of contributions demonstrated the appeal of sidestepping traditional gallery or art-world settings for a playful and possibility-filled alternative — but the works themselves demonstrated the value in acting on that appeal.

Lanfranco Aceti, images from “One Unit of a Slap (Slap in the Face, Medium to Strong, Colorful),” #exstrange auction

For all the freedom it offers from gallery strictures, eBay comes with its own constraints — a conceptual (as opposed to material) piece still needs to be framed to function in, or respond to, a sales setting. Lanfranco Aceti listed “One Unit of Slap (Slap in the Face, Medium to Strong, Colorful),” for instance, as a $500 gift certificate that would entitle the buyer “to own a slap in the face,” dealt by Aceti to a collaborator; this would entail a numbered and signed receipt, as well as the opportunity to witness the slap via Skype or FaceTime. Ann Bartges sold “shadow, middle-aged,” listed under “Other Women’s Accessories,” for $2.25. Megan Hildebrandt offered “ANXIETY DISORDER FOR SALE” (listed under “Tickets & Experiences”) without any clear explanation of how this would be delivered. When a potential bidder raised a concern about whether whatever it was could shipped to India, Hildebrandt replied she would ship for free, “as I am really looking to get rid of it.” It sold for $1.99. Meanwhile, she solved the problem of providing potential buyers with a depiction of her wares by filling eBay’s image box with the familiar red slash-in-a-circle “no” or “do not” symbol.

Obviously this sort of listing reframes eBay itself, converting the potential transaction into something a lot more complicated than the neat, near-mindless fusion of supply and demand. So did #exstrange listings that involved material objects. Sreshta Rit Premnath offered “A Flimsy Alibi,” in the form of a hunk of cardboard, pictured on a subway-station floor, with a poem as the official item description; someone bought it for a penny.

Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda, operating as the collaborative practice Out-of-Sync, listed clear bags of paper shreds, positioned as the result of an “endurance performance” — a year spent shredding “every piece of text” associated with Neumark’s lost teaching position; listed as art, under “mixed media, collage,” “Shreds” sold for $5.50.

Out-of-Sync (Maria Miranda & Norie Neumark), image from “Shreds,” #exstrange auction

Some artists addressed internet or tech-defined culture directly. In an extension of her ongoing Archive Fever project, Elisa Giardina Papa offered one month of her browser history on a pink thumb drive for 99 cents, describing it as a de facto “unedited narrative” of her personal and professional life, as mediated by the traces of her web wandering. JODI’s “EBAY shopping bag,” a physical shopping bag decorated with the digital store’s logo, listed under “Equipment & Material Stores,” sold for €60. Given the variety suggested here, it’s worth pausing over how #exstrange contributors resolved the challenge, or exploited the opportunity, of eBay’s image box: a no-frills photo of a bag of paper shreds actually makes a perverse kind of sense among all the amateur photography on the site, while the shopping bag quietly mimics the slick, professional merch pic that’s really just as common. The visual quality of the sales image usually communicates something about the nature of the seller and his or her goods — and #exstrange artists seemed to both play to and with that expectation.

Others turned the eBay listing into a site for political provocation. Masimba Hwati, based in Harare, Zimbabwe, sold a “soil sample” taken from a hill in that city where “the First Colonialist settlers planted the British flag” in 1890. (Here the sales image is a tasteful vase, full of dirt.) Listed under “Land” on ebay.uk, then relisted on ebay.com, where the closest available category was “Real Estate,” it sold for $36. Speaking more bluntly to current events, UK-based artist collective IOCOSE offered “Instant Protest!,” described as “photos of people from all over the world demonstrating in the streets with your favourite slogan” and allegedly useful for news articles or social-media campaigns. The listing’s promo images showed anonymous demonstrators with signs marked “LOREM IPSUM.” Offered in an edition of 10 at the “Buy It Now” price of $10, it sold out.

Masimba Hwati, images from “(Kutengesa Nyika) Soil Sample from Harare Kopje,” #exstrange auction

While this sampling covers only a small fraction of #exstrange, it should hint at the border-hopping sweep of the project, the sheer variety and firepower of the provocations — and, it’s important to note, the entertainment — on offer. One can only speculate as to the time and effort it would take to match it with an exhibition in art-world-suitable physical space(s). But whatever this may say about the challenges the project offers to standard gallery practice, the way it engages with eBay and the intersections of capitalism and technology that we’ve slowly come to take for granted is even more significant.

Toward the end of its run, #exstrange explored these intersections through a batch of auctions devised in collaboration with consumer-culture researchers. Eight listings offered unusual “products” that commented on contemporary notions of “networked” society — and, to further complicate matters, offered duplicates that simply positioned the exact same items in different ways. For instance, an iPhone EarthX – 4.7” was described as brand new, unlocked, and biodegradable, among other features; with no battery or memory limits, an “analog” operating system, and compatible only with an “Earth to Earth” network, it “dramatically improves the most important aspects of the iPhone experience.” The body material: “cast clay (unfired) and earth.” It was listed for 1 cent. An essentially identical version of the object and its accompanying sales text, with different promotional images and auction titles, was listed for $10. Through a series of direct interactions with the public, the researchers borrowed #exstrange’s conversion of a shopping space into an art space, and further converted it into a laboratory space.

ConnX, images from “iPhone EarthX — 4.7” Smartphone, Compatible with LFR Networks,” #exstrange auction

Whatever the results, it’s the fact of the experiment that matters. At the time eBay first made its way into the public mind, optimistic self-styled experts on the coming web-connected world declared that a new utopian marketplace of ideas was upon us; tired and stultifying gatekeepers would be swept aside, previously marginal or idiosyncratic thought could compete fairly with the hidebound and the elite, and the people would form our own more perfect polis. One popular metaphor for describing this suddenly inevitable new world pitted the cathedral against the bazaar — one model suggesting that the many are forced to listen to and obey the few, the other reflecting the agora-like ideal of unlimited conversation and debate and exchange.

Perhaps this has even turned out to be true, although we have since learned that the unlimited marketplace of ideas offers peddlers of the ugly and the shoddy fresh opportunity to expand their audiences, too. But more to the point, this wild new world often turns out to feel surprisingly stultified and regimented and formatted and controlled, filtered through prefab structures like Facebook and Google and, yes, eBay. What replaced the cathedral often feels less like a bazaar than a mall.

#exstrange reveals that there are some cracks and corners in these virtual structures, hidden in plain sight and waiting to exploited. It takes just one encounter with a truly unexpected eBay listing to reframe what eBay is, and what (and who) the wider techno-culture it now represents is really for — to complicate, if only momentarily, whatever’s going through “the unconscious mind of capitalism.” This is the real transaction, and this is the real exchange. It doesn’t cost a penny, and you couldn’t own it if you wanted to. There is nothing more valuable.

Elisa Giardina Papa, image from “Archive Fever Vol.37: My browser history [Feb 2017],” #exstrange auction

JODI, image from “EBAY shopping bag (#exstrange edition),” #exstrange auction

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