Left Index Phalanges

Hi! Thank you so much!

It’s a great question, not shallow at all. I find that making my stats pretty and playing with layouts, colours and fonts is the highlight of the statistical process. :)

This might be a longer answer than you expected or might have wanted - so consider yourself warned.

I do all ofmy graphs and data analysis in Excel – I love all the things you can easilycustom. I don’t know how much you have worked with Excel, so this will be avery thorough tutorial. My Excel is in Swedish, but I hope that my explanationswill be good enough so that there is no confusion. Another thing to note isthat I use Excel 2013, and there are differences between the versions, and myoperating system is Windows.

When I have my data, Imark the data I want to use and go to the tab “Insert” and choose the pie chartoption.

I choose apie chart and it pops up.

NowI want a different layout, so I press the layout option and choose the one Iwant. Here, I’ve chosen one that have the explanation (countries in this case)in the data label together with the percentage.

Then I markall the data labels by clicking one of them.

I rightclick and choose the option “Format data labels” and the bar to the right showsup.

Then I tickthe box that says “Value” under “Label contains” (because I want the number offics as well as the percentage in my data labels). Under “Label position” Ichoose “Outside”.

This is to get the labels out of the way. Now they’re in a giant mess, though, butthat can be fixed by just dragging them into the positions you want. Then Iclick on one of the pieces of the pie chart. This will mark the pie chart as awhole.

To justmark a single piece – just click the same piece again.

Now, whenyou have one piece marked (here I have the Russian piece). Right click on thepiece and you get a menu. Here, choose “Filling”.

Then youget this menu, with a lot of options like colours, tinted colours, or – the onewe’re after – “Picture…”.

In myversion of Excel I get this box by clicking “Picture…”. It wants me to choosefrom a picture I have saved on my computer or use Bing picture search to findone. I think older versions might just have the option to choose a picture fromyour computer and by cliciking “Picture…” you will automatically open yourpicture folder.

Then youjust choose a picture you want and your result will be that the piece of thepie chart now will be filled with the picture you choose.

Then you dothe same with the next pie chart piece. You click it to mark the next one instead of the one you already have filled.

Then youright click, choose “Filling”, then “Picture…” and you choose the picture youwant.

Here I wanta picture of the Spanish flag for the Spanish piece of the pie chart. Then you do the same for the third (the Chinese piece in my case). But below you cansee that I just got a red part of the flag, and unfortunately once I’ve choosena picture I can’t change what part of the picture end up as a filling.

So what Idid was that I saved a picture of the Chinese flag on my computer and rotatedit 90° like this:

And then Iused this rotated flag as the picture to fill the piece. Then we at least gotto see some of the stars.

You can dothe same thing to other diagrams – as I did with the Nordic languages. I markmy data and choose a diagram.

Here, Ichoose one that have 3D-effects. Then I click twice on a bar to mark it.

Then, rightclick on the bar and choose “Filling” and “Picture…”.

Then it lookssomething like this.

I wasn’thappy with that result so I saved pictures of the Nordic flags and rotated them– just like I did with the Chinese one. And I got this result instead:

Which I thoughtwas an improvement.

I hope thiswill help you and that I made this guide understandable and not too boring.

I got curious about what kind of fanfiction was written in my native tounge Swedish and started collecting some data from AO3. I quickly found out there is a total of 91 works (July the 12th 2016). I thought it would be cool to make a pie chart to compare the total works on AO3 and the number of Swedish works.

The problem is that there exist 2398351 fanworks on AO3 (July the 12th 2016) and only 91 of them are in Swedish. That equals 0,0038%, which won’t even show up in a pie chart. Then I began to wonder how many works there are that are not in English and how the use of Swedish compare to other Non-English languages.

It turns out that English fanworks make up a total of 95% of the AO3 archive (2277118 fanworks, July the 12th 2016) and if you make a pie chart that compares the number of fanworks in languges that are not English, Swedish is still barely visible. So I made a pie chart comparing the number of fanworks in languages that are not in English and only included languages that are used in more than 1000 fanworks. This is the result:

Then I thought it would be fun to compare the number of Swedish works to the number of works that uses our neighbouring countries languages. So I made a diagram of the use of the Nordic languages. And finally! Swedish is actually visible! Wohoo!

But we’re kind of overshadowed by our Finnish neighbours. How come you have so much more works written in your language, Finland?

Anyway, there are 91 fanworks in Swedish. If we look at when they were published we get this graph:

It looks like the trend is that more and more works in Swedish are getting published, but the large spike in June 2016 is mostly composed of works by the same authour who joined AO3 a month earlier. So I wouldn’t say that the Swedish part of AO3 neccesarily is getting more active – it could be that more authors are finiding their way over to the archive.

Of the 91 fanworks, 5 are podfics of other Swedish fics. So I excluded them from the rest of my analysis as I didn’t want to count the same story twice.

This is the results when I looked at what categories the fanfic’s are tagged with:

Here we can see that the largest part is M/M, which is not that surprising since this seems to be the case for the whole archive. What sticks out to me is that Gen seems to be so much more popular than F/F and F/M and that people seems to be quite bad at tagging since almost 19% of the works aren’t tagged with a category. I don’t know how this corresponds to the archive as a whole – if anyone know, please tell!

Next, I looked at the ratings of the fics. We can see that more than half of all the fics are rated as General. This differs from how all the fanworks on AO3 are rated, as seen below.

We now see that the Swedish fanfics in general have much lower ratings than all the fanworks on AO3.

These are the fandoms that produced Swedish fanfics. The diagram only includes those that have more than one work. The rest is in this list:

Not surprisingly, there are quite a few Swedish TV-shows and movies that have inspired fanfics. Another thing I find interesting is that many of these fandoms are shows, movies or books that are primarily addressing children (Astrid Lindgren’s stories, Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter, Fairy tales, Moomin and Sailor Moon (that was shown as a children’s programme on a public network)). Maybe this has a correlation with the amount of G-rated, and Gen-categorized work. My thought is that if you write a fanfic for something you watched or read as a child, you are maybe more inclined to write it in your native tongue as it is more likely that you watched or read it in that language. I apply the same argument to the Swedish TV-shows, books and movies that also have fanfics written about them.

We can also see that some of the more popular fandom also have works in Swedish, such as Supernatural, Sherlock, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, LoTR, Hawaii Five-0, One Direction, Once Upon a Time, DCU and Naruto.

The ratio of original work (the No Fandom bar) compared to the total number of Swedish fics is also significantly larger than the same ratio on all of AO3’s works. The ratio for Swedish works is 31% compared to the total AO3 ratio at 0,9% (I used both the tags “No Fandom” and “Original Work” to get this ratio).

You should know that I when a fic is tagged with more than one fandom I have split them up and counted that fic both as a, for example, Doctor Who fic and a Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter fic. So if you add all the fandoms and the number of fics they have – you will get a number that’s higher than 91.

Then we come to the pairings. These are divided in the same way as the fandoms. In the diagram there’s pairings that feature in more than one work. And here comes the list with the pairings with only one work:

As you can see, I haven’t split pairings that are listed for the same fic. One reason I didn’t do the same as with the fandoms is that the fics that have multiple pairings listed are not crossovers, i.e. they are all from the same fandom, so I think that this actually make it easier to see which kind of pairings that are featured in Swedish fanfics and the other reason is that I was a bit lazy.

One of the most popular pairings are Samir Badran/Vikor Frisk and this is quite a new pairing. The 4 fics that are about them were published between March and May this year. And this corresponds to their second participation as a duo in Melodifestivalen, which is the competition and TV-show that decides which artist/group that are going to represent Sweden in Eurovision Song Contest (if you don’t know what ESC is, here is a guide) and that approximately 36% of the Swedish population is watching.

Pairings that I haven’t seen in another context is Vladimir Putin/Joseph Stalin, Pippin/Hagrid and Tenth Doctor/Eva (Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter). This wasn’t something I expected. It’s really elating to see what people’s imagination can result in.

Now, we take a look at the word count of the Swedish fanfics. The longest one (at 59445 words) is a fanfic about the Swedish TV-show Rederiet. But 80% of the fics are beneath 5000 words long. So that gave me the incentive to break these fics into smaller groups.

Here, we can see that 43% of the Swedish fics are actually beneath 1000 words long and 68% is under 2000 words long. I haven’t compared this to the total number of fics on AO3, but I get the feeling that we have a higher percentage of really short stories than the whole of AO3. (This was actually the feeling I got when I gathered the data as well.)

Hi there,

I’m a long-time fan myself and I’m currently conducting a survey on fans and their use of Tumblr for my thesis.

Complete honesty: it’s long. It consists of 30 questions, most of which are open-ended. It took me about half an hour to complete it myself. I know that’s a lot to ask, so I would really appreciate it if you (yes, you, thanks for not just scrolling past this!) decided to take the survey.

On August 1, 2016, I’ll be raffling off twenty-five $10 prizes among all the respondents ($250 total, each winner can choose between Paypal or an Amazon gift card). I wish I could compensate everyone for their time, but it’s sadly not feasible. I hope this makes up for it somewhat.

I’m also very grateful for any and all reblogs and signal boosts. :)

Because most of the questions are qualitative and open-ended, I’m going to have to end accepting new responses (otherwise I’ll never get done analyzing the responses). I’ll leave the survey open until 6 pm German time today (that’s 5 pm in the UK, and 12 noon Eastern time in the States) so that anyone currently taking it can still submit their forms.

I’ve gotten a lot of encouraging comments (thank you all!) and a couple questions on the last survey question. Since it’ll take me a while to actually read all the responses thoroughly and I noticed this question came up a couple times: I don’t have any plans on ever publishing this thesis. One copy of it will be stored at a FU Berlin library (oops, don’t even know which one, I should find this out), where it will surely collect dust. But I will definitely make an effort to post the findings in a condensed form to my Tumblr, and if you’d like and I’m not too embarrassed by whatever I end up writing, I can always send you a PDF version.

To the three of you who mentioned writing their theses on fandom-related topics as well: good luck! *sends coffee*

To those of you curious about fandom studies and asking for literature: Henry Jenkins’ “Textual Poachers” is a really good start (his newer stuff, too), as is from more of an outsider’s perspective Camille Bacon-Smith’s “Enterprising Women”. Those are both from 1992 and seem to be the bibles of fandom studies, although Bacon-Smith’s approach and conclusions have been criticized a fair amount. Matt Hills is good too. There’s actually been tons of academic study of fans in the past 20 or so years. :) The Organization for Transformative Works has a journal that anyone can read online if you’d like a good place to start online.

Hi there,

I’m a long-time fan myself and I’m currently conducting a survey on fans and their use of Tumblr for my thesis.

Complete honesty: it’s long. It consists of 30 questions, most of which are open-ended. It took me about half an hour to complete it myself. I know that’s a lot to ask, so I would really appreciate it if you (yes, you, thanks for not just scrolling past this!) decided to take the survey.

On August 1, 2016, I’ll be raffling off twenty-five $10 prizes among all the respondents ($250 total, each winner can choose between Paypal or an Amazon gift card). I wish I could compensate everyone for their time, but it’s sadly not feasible. I hope this makes up for it somewhat.

I’m also very grateful for any and all reblogs and signal boosts. :)