So there have been a few posts in the General Fanfiction section recently, by people doing a report on "fanfiction" as a subculture for their Anthropology 101 course or whatever.
They tend to be asking for demographic information, and that's a pretty piecemeal way to get data, it's not going to be very useful. I was thinking about that as a data problem, and realized that most of that information already exists in the auto-completed member accounts.
I think it would be interesting to scrape the information off the "user profiles" for stuff like, age / gender / location; and then other stuff like join date, post count, and time spent online. And then, once that information was slapped in a spreadsheet or a MDB or whatever, run some stats to see what kind of patterns and correlations emerge. The more I think about it, the more interesting that's starting to sound to me, as a member of the forum.
So I guess there are two questions I have:
1) I don't have the technical saavy to grab the data (once it's in a single file I can run from there though). Is this something that someone else in the audience could do, or is it super-hard for reasons I'm ignorant of, or what?
2) Would people be okay with this? I mean, are there any objections, like it makes you feel uncomfortable (ideally for reasons you can articulate)?
They tend to be asking for demographic information, and that's a pretty piecemeal way to get data, it's not going to be very useful. I was thinking about that as a data problem, and realized that most of that information already exists in the auto-completed member accounts.
I think it would be interesting to scrape the information off the "user profiles" for stuff like, age / gender / location; and then other stuff like join date, post count, and time spent online. And then, once that information was slapped in a spreadsheet or a MDB or whatever, run some stats to see what kind of patterns and correlations emerge. The more I think about it, the more interesting that's starting to sound to me, as a member of the forum.
So I guess there are two questions I have:
1) I don't have the technical saavy to grab the data (once it's in a single file I can run from there though). Is this something that someone else in the audience could do, or is it super-hard for reasons I'm ignorant of, or what?
2) Would people be okay with this? I mean, are there any objections, like it makes you feel uncomfortable (ideally for reasons you can articulate)?
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