jakec007 / hugo_stats

For a stat project I looked at Hugo Award nominations over the past 11 years

An Exploratory Data Analysis Of The 2011-2020 Hugo Nominations Data

For a class stats project I examined Hugo Award nominations over the past 11 years.

Disclaimers

• The data entry was done by hand, as such it is possible that there is an error in the data set
• I pruned nominations with multiple authors from my data set because it would violate my assumption of one set of pronouns per nomination
• I want to make it very clear that I am glad that the Hugo Awards have recently been more conscious about gender equity.

About This Project

• My data source was the hugo awards website
  • To ascertain an author's pronouns, I looked through an author's twitter, Wikipedia page, or website.
  • Nominations with multiple authors were excluded because it would violate my assumption of one set of pronouns per nomination.
  • I only looked at the following categories because finding an author's pronouns is labor intensive so I had to limit the scope of the project
    • Best Novel
    • Best Novella
    • Best Novelette
  • Each category yielded ~66 observational units.
• I used Python to do some minimal data processing and R for data viz

Results

Some Overall Stats Relating To The Nominations Per Author Image

• Best Novel Nominations
  • There are 24 unique authors that use she/her pronouns
  • There are 23 unique authors that use he/him pronouns
  • There are 0 unique authors that use they/them pronouns
• Best Novella Nominations
  • There are 21 unique authors that use she/her pronouns
  • There are 23 unique authors that use he/him pronouns
  • There are 2 unique authors that use they/them pronouns
• Best Novelette Nominations
  • There are 28 unique authors that use she/her pronouns
  • There are 26 unique authors that use he/him pronouns
  • There is 1 unique author that use they/them pronouns
• The three authors with the most nominations are
  1. Seanan McGuire (7)
  2. Mira Grant (6) 8/29/20 UPDATE: Turns out Mira Grant is a pen name for Seanan McGuire. Shout out to islemaster for catching this!
  3. Aliette de Bodard (5)

Project Directory

hugo_stats's Issues

Take pen names into account

In your summary results, you mention:

The three authors with the most nominations are

1. Seanan McGuire (7)
2. Mira Grant (6)
3. Aliette de Bodard (5)

However, according to Wikipedia "Mira Grant" is a pen name for Seanan McGuire. That feels like important context for interpreting these results. At the least, please add a note to this effect.

It would be interesting to see these results with pen names attributed back to the actual author, where possible - and probably makes the pattern of a large number of nominations going to a small number of authors even more acute.