My AO3 reading history

[superborb]

~Inspired~ by the end of year memes, I was curious what my actual AO3 reading history was like. These data were directly scraped from the history page, so they're only as accurate as that. Namely, AO3 only gives you the date you last opened a fic and dynamically updates things like word count; also, some fics I might have opened without reading all the way through etc etc. So pretty fuzzy here.

Some interesting graphs for my own edification:

The number of works that I've read this year looks like a substantial increase over previous years, BUT remember that only the most recent visit "counts," so if I had a long fic that I most recently read in 2020... (I say to myself to make myself feel better.)


If you look instead at word count, what the actual fuck. Apparently I've opened / read 60 million words this year GOODBYE.


Word count by fandom:
I divided the word count equally among fandoms when multiple fandoms were present.
My top 10 list was:
1.9M words: 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
1.3M words: 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV)
405K words: 人渣反派自救系统 - 墨香铜臭 | The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
140K words: Hockey RPF
136K words: 人渣反派自救系统 - 墨香铜臭 | The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - Mòxiāng Tóngshiù
126K words: 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV)
124K words: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
120K words: 魔道祖师 | Módào Zǔshī (Cartoon)
103K words: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
94K words: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)

Actually, I'm very surprised by this, because I didn't think I had read a lot of Hockey RPF this year? But I looked at the fics, and they were all longer fics that I had first read years ago, so I probably didn't remember it bc I didn't reread the whole thing. Ditto with Harry Potter.
However, the top slots all belonging to MXTX and related fandoms makes sense haha.

Word count by character and relationship:
For these, I didn't divide the word count, so numbers are not going to add up. I felt like it was a more fair comparison point though!
27.4M words: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
4.4M words: Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín & Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
3.4M words: Jiāng Yànlí/Jīn Zǐxuān
3.2M words: No relationship
2.8M words: Luò Bīnghé/Shěn Yuán | Shěn Qīngqiū
2.6M words: Lán Huàn | Lán Xīchén/Mèng Yáo | Jīn Guāngyáo
2.0M words: Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín/Lán Huàn | Lán Xīchén
1.8M words: Lán Huàn | Lán Xīchén & Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī
1.5M words: Liǔ Qīnggē/Shěn Yuán | Shěn Qīngqiū
1.3M words: Original Shěn Qīngqiū/Yuè Qīngyuán

27.0M words: Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
26.8M words: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī
18.8M words: Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín
17.2M words: Lán Huàn | Lán Xīchén
13.6M words: Lán Yuàn | Lán Sīzhuī
11.3M words: Niè Huáisāng
11.1M words: Jiāng Yànlí
9.7M words: Wēn Níng | Wēn Qiónglín
8.2M words: Jīn Líng | Jīn Rúlán
7.9M words: Wēn Qíng

No surprises there, based on the top fandoms! I'm surprised there's so much Xicheng though, since I don't think I read very much of it.

Since 2013, I've encountered 539 deleted works. Feels like a lot, it's really a tiny fraction!

Technical notes:
I forked my AO3 code from @/regretsonmain, who also answered my extremely confused cookie questions (thanks again!). I added a bunch of parsing to get more info out of the history, and you can peek at the code here: https://github.com/superborb/ao3.

It turns out the AO3 timeout, when you load too many works at once (aka AO3 jail, thanks @/musikologie for that excellent term) is not as much a problem if you are just looking at your reading history! I thought this would be the main issue with scraping, but it was not. The code does handle it correctly and sleeps for a bit before trying again.

Anyway, I'm not sure what other interesting tidbits might be in this data... I'm very much not a data scientist haha. I got a bit bored of the data and didn't finish up the tag canonization checker which might be where more interesting stuff lies? But my conclusion from this is really that the reading history is not very informative about my reading habits, since it doesn't track what I reread most often, just what I click on.

Comments

[rekishi]

I mean. I am a woman of many talents but "ah yes let me rewrite part of this device's operating system myself" is not one of them. (Don't tell my colleagues, they think I can do everything with technology.)

Mostly I want that thing to be usable with Calibre and be able to do collections and stuff (because my calibre is a very organized). That excludes certain kindles already.

So we'll see. I didn't feel like queuing up at the bookstore today.