reflexive fandom stats

[felinejumper]

spitballing some pseudocode solutions to a purely personal stats issue, mostly for my own later reference.

problem: Goodreads has no record of the astounding amount of fanfiction I’ve read this year -->  my book count is impossibly and inaccurately low (31!! for shame!). But like...at least two fics I can think of are about the length of Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire, longer than anything from LOTR, etc etc, and I’ve read them all at least twice in the past year, and I know I've read the Paradox series + Best and Brightest at least four times, and in the heady winter 2018 days I just chewed through fanfiction every moment of my life. And I love end of the year lists and stats!
solution: code that hikes through one's AO3 history + spits out some stats of one's choosing in an organized & beautiful fashion
pseudocode layout:

1. Pull history, bookmarks, read later lists (with the unofficial pypi package?)
2. Retrieve specified time frame from history
3. Remove history that's cross listed with read later (assumption that you have not yet read read later items, which is true for me but – could be a built in option w/o too much trouble I’d think?)
4. Possibly only count works with kudos? -- given that I now leave kudos on every piece i finish, you could assume that from, uh, september onwards kudos = read.
5. In any case, retrieve word counts for relevant fics, add word counts together -- "You could have read War and Peace twice instead of that Sherlock/John fucking for 50 chapters piece!" (no thank you I am good w. my choices)
6. Get annoyed at the stupidity of book count as a measure of quality
7. Profit, feel crushed by the quantification of winter 2018's deep depression

bonuses:

• Make it generalizable ++ filtering choice of user, like a good programmer
• seaborn graphs <3 <3
• Time of day/year stats
• clusters of time w.r.t when i was reading compulsively at work
• Oooh, that but w.r.t tags (fluff vs angst the obvious, but maybe more granular?)
• Evolution of fandom phases: when did one start reading (totally hypothetically) black sails fic? which pairings? when?
• Clicking through chapters vs reading all at once? when does it count as a hit?
• How to approach re-reads? You could imagine a clustered “many hits/short time” for a long fic counting as a read, and a short fic  counting as many reads
• Unclear how to dismiss fics that weren’t finished or you closed out of or etc etc etc etc
• Tragic not to have my early history!! in fact (oh my god) in fact I only got an ao3 account JANUARY 6 2018, which means I just missed my REAL deep initial phase
• And it's not in my browser history anymore as far as I can tell, which is surprising given that I would have been using chrome? maybe retrievable if I dig.

Comments

[oulfis]

Hmm, I'd probably just do a works count, since I don't have page counts for a lot of what I read (too many audiobooks). I definitely don't have word counts for the book-books I read so even if I wanted to get fancy and look up paper equivalents for my audiobooks I'd just convert words > pages at some standard approximation (250-300 wds/page?).

I do leave kudos on everything I finish, though I also re-read a lot and it's only one kudos per fic. So I don't know if that would work as a metric. I definitely don't read or finish everything I open... :/

I'm not shy of a decent amount of data post-processing; when I look at my goodreads reading data I usually manipulate and supplement that info a decent amount. So I could weed out fics by hand that I don't think I read.