Hockey Stats 2: Electric Boogaloo

[nakedbee]

I revisited the data I'd collected for my earlier post and generated a ton of graphs. So many fascinating patterns in the data! I feel like I could take over the world armed with little more than regular expressions and Excel. Woo!



Feedback histograms
I'd noticed that stories generally get more kudos than comments or bookmarks; it's interesting to see the numbers in aggregate. The majority of stories convert less than 5% of their hits to kudos.


Feedback by hits
Looking at feedback as a function of hits for each fix; for the most part feedback trends upwards in sync with the number of hits.


Kudos by hits
Here we get needlessly quantitative and fit a line to the data. I discarded the extremely popular fics and zoomed in on the majority (the 90% of fics with under 100 kudos and under 2,000 hits). As we saw in the histogram above, average kudos rate is about 5%. The equivalent rates were 1% and 0.3% for comments and bookmarks - not shown. (Sorry about the arbitrary color shift … logically these dots should be blue in keeping with the previous two graphs.)


Word count histogram
Just a simple look at the distribution of fic lengths. The couple of fics at less than 10 words were both graphics (hence the low word count). Fics in the 1-5k range are far and away the most common.


Word count by character
This was pretty fun. I used only the first-listed pairing for each fic (rather than sort out all listed pairings). Then I included all players who had ~10 or more fics written about them. The really popular pairings are readily apparent and most of the longer stories are also the most common pairings, so there are a lot of obvious pairs of dots. It was also fun to identify the exeptions.


Fics by character
This next graph turned into a long series of sub-graphs. I started with the same set of "most popular" players as the previous graph and plotted the number of stories about them at any given date, showing the increase over time. In this graph you can see that most of the stories have been written in the past two years and that there are lots of Kaner/Tazer fics (but if you're reading this far, you'd probably noticed that on AO3 already).

Fics by character - past year
Zooming in on just May 2011 to May 2012 so we can see a little more detail. Kaner/Tazer clearly dominates, but Sidney Crosby also breaks out of the pack; the rest of the lines are a muddle.


Next I broke it down by teams to be able to differentiate the individual players

Fics by character - Blackhawks
Kaner's and Tazer's lines step forward almost identically. A few early stories apparently had Tazer without Kaner, but pretty soon they're operating almost exclusively in step. Duncs is almost always paired with Seabs, but Sharpie doesn't seem to have an OTP (one true partner); he's popular and in a lot of fics in a main pairing, but there's no one other person that he's always paired with.


Fics by character - Penguins (+ Ovechkin)
What this graph says to me: Ovie and Geno are tied in a race for Sid's affections! Jordy hangs around and is occasionally invited over for a threesome.


Fics by character - Flyers
Claude and Danny are mostly in step.


Fics by character - Hurricanes
They occasionally are paired with others, but it's mostly Eric/Jeff all the time.


Fics by character - Oilers
At first I wondered why Ryan's line had such a pronounced delay compared to the other two, then I realized 2011 was his rookie year, so of course he wasn't being written about before then!


Fics by character - Canadiens
PK was drafted in 2007, but it looks like he didn't move up from the farm team permanently until the 2011/2012 season (thanks, Wikipedia!) I find it pretty interesting how Carey's line had plateaued until PK comes along and they rocket up together. :)


Fics by character - Kesler/Ladd
I think the fact that these guys aren't on the same team really shows here. I decided to include Ladd even through he's got fewer than 10 fics, because Kesler's longest fics are almost all with Ladd.


And that's all. Whew!

Comments

[shihadchick]

Interesting! The trends are, as you said, fairly obvious on the AO3 as well, but it's neat to see them with some numbers and in graphical terms. I enjoyed the team colours on the fics by character wrt word count graph. :DDD

[thefourthvine]

This is so great and so fascinating. I mean, yeah, a lot of these trends I had already noticed, but now I have seen them in GRAPHS. And graphs make everything better. Yay!

[burnishedvictory]

So cool. It's neat to see the trends all graphed out.