English Guardian Fic Masterlist

[naye]

With the help of flamebyrd's fantastic bookmarklet I went ahead and pulled all the Guardian fic listed as being in English off AO3 into one single spreadsheet, then manually weeded out all the non-English stories that had ended up in that list.

The curated result might be helpful for those who (like me) want to keep track of what they have and haven't read, and get an overview of all the amazing fics this fandom has to offer:

English Guardian fic on AO3 Masterlist [update available April 24]*

The curated list currently has 601 stories ranging from 100 to over 90,000 words, for a total wordcount of 2,662,170!

I recommend that those who want to use the spreadsheet go to File > Make a Copy, which should create a copy on your own Google Drive that can be filtered, sorted and edited.

As for updates, I will try to stop by with a new version in a while, but if anyone else feels that they'd like to do more regular upkeep then please do! The spreadsheet is absolutely free to use in any way, including reposting in an edited format.

* Thanks to those who pointed out a couple of duplicates and several missed stories (sorry to anyone who was on page 20 of the AO3 search results - it fell off the list!). I've updated the sheet with a new April 24 version that's at 606 603 stories. Going forward, story count will be included in the spreadsheet title to make it easier to spot edits and updates. And please do let me know if you notice any other errors!

Comments

[qikiqtarjuaq]

This spreadsheet is a damned treasure, especially for Yuletide!

You know, I currently have a webhost running. I'm very tempted to turn this into a database, and then recruit people who can submit updates to it. That might make the upkeep of this easier!

[naye]

For Yuletide it would probably make most sense to do a full spreadsheet tagged "English" and "Chinese" so the Yuletide mods could compare with the AO3 results and see at a glance what the situation is like... But yeah, definitely!

A database would be fantastic! I don't have the skills (or hosting) for it, but absolutely go for it!

Upkeep-wise, the one thing that made me realize I'll have to do an entire new search & import is that things like kudos and comment counts change constantly for all stories, not just the new ones. So if anyone were using those for sorting, that would start skewing the saved results compared to live ones (where new fic added but not updated wouldn't reflect the kudos/comment situation).

But if it's possible to get a database to pull live info from AO3 after you've added it in the first place, that would be the ultimate solution.

[qikiqtarjuaq]

Yeah, I was actually thinking of just excluding the kudos/comment counts. I can write a scraper, but I feel like it's more effort than it's worth. Do you think it's critical to have that info?

If I'm at the point where I'm coding something to scrape that much info off AO3, I'd be tempted to hook in a language detector and have updates done automatically.

[naye]

When I was poking around GitHub I spotted at least one script that seemed to be an AO3 scraper? So if you know how to run one you might not have to write anything... Worth a look by someone who knows something about coding, at least! (Which is to say not me.)

[qikiqtarjuaq]

I'll have to take a gander through GitHub then! (And pray for good documentation and code commenting and maybe a pony while I'm at it).

But yeah, if I could scrape a list of "Actually English" and "Actually Chinese" fics, that would be very compelling for the Yuletide evidence post, and also won't require so much work on your part! I've got a bunch of fic exchange deadlines coming up but once those pass, I'm gonna give this a serious look.

[naye]

Good luck with the deadlines! And do let me know if I can do anything to help - I literally haven't coded anything in over a decade, but I can do QC and manual stuff?

[qikiqtarjuaq]

Awesome! I'll definitely need people to look it over and test it once it's ready, so I'll give you a poke then. :D