Sherlock Creator waves (praise the tenacious!)
From my last post on Sherlock fanworks creators (those active on AO3), after series three we see (a few) more creators no longer posting to the fandom than are joining, and I’ve heard a number of people voice concern that a lot of the long term contributors decided to leave after this new dose of canon and the fandom conflicts that followed. Many of us have heard of beloved creators backing away, and that is enough reason to ask: Have we lost more people than usual?
To answer this, I grouped Sherlock creators by the time of their first postings to AO3, refer to here as Creator Waves. In the plots above, we have the contributions of each semi-annual wave of creators since the show started airing in mid 2010.
Plot 1 shows the number of creators from each wave posting per week, all stacked on top of each other (interactive plot). From this, it is clear that recent contributors add the most fresh works to archive, while the numbers of active creators from each wave shrinks over time to be a whispy tail. These tails of the early creator waves are made by many of our most tenacious artists, those who have give us classics and continue to be shape our common culture. (One day I might get back to this as look at how seniority relates to popularity…)
The shape here is much the same as seen in my last post, with series 3 making a big spike in productivity, similar to the jump from series 2. And looking at the creator waves around this time, it is evident that the excitement isn’t limited to the new voices. Given that we know that the number of active creators per wave decays over time, is this bump important to all of these waves or just some?
Plot 2 let’s us compare these waves on their respective time lines: it reports the number of active contributors in each wave after their first six months in the fandom (interact with it here). That decay is even more obvious here, a common rate of attrition across the waves. Or mostly: the early joiners to fandom seem a bit more persistent than those who’ve popped in as the show gained greater popularity, but the shapes are about the same.
In this second plot, I’ve marked where series 2 and series 3 land on each of creator wave’s timeline. For all of these waves we have a distinct bump for series 3, perched on top of the expected reduction of active contributors. Series 3 did have a galvanising effect, bringing people back to share new creations. (I haven’t assess this statistically, but the pattern is pretty strong, so I doubt a time series model would suggest otherwise.)
While we have seen slightly more creator attrition since series 3, and some people have announced their departure the Sherlock Fandom, that isn’t the whole story. Whatever their reasons, plenty of creators, old and new, came to share works via AO3 around the airing of series 3, and the fandom is still going strong as we enter our second year of haitus.
P.S. The links to the interactive graphs are actually pretty cool: you can move your mouse to highlight different data points and series and see the specific numbers per week. If you want to understand these graphs better, it’s worth clicking through to play with them yourself.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1AOwlZX