Numbers!

Alys · Post by **Alys** » May 17th, 2006, 7:15 pm

I was curious about statistics for solo versus group project readers, and then again about general contribution of the "average" reader, so I thought I'd look at some of the data from the catalog.

Disclaimers and rationale
I looked at the Completed Books, Short Work, and Other Languages section. This information does NOT include Poetry contributions. I also did not count Songs of Innocence and Experience or Aesop's Fables because they were so short that I considered the time commitment to be more in line with poetry than chapters of a book. Keep in mind that this data also does not reflect chapters a reader may have contributed to a book that has not been been catalogued yet. I know from my own experience that more than half of my contributions to group projects are still waiting for the book to be finished. This should be kept in mind when looking at the data and is particularly applicable to new volunteers, who may be represented by only 1 or 2 catalogued chapters, when they have, in fact, contributed much more to books waiting to be finished.

In the Completed Books/Short Works/OL catalog, there were 208 individual readers. (As best as I can tell anyway. This is more difficult to ascertain than one would think. For instance, I know that Laura Fox and Fox in the Stars are the same person and could count her data as the same person regardless of which name she was listed under, but some of the Firstname versus Firstname Lastname issues I couldn't determine, and had to count them as separate people. I did the best I could, but I'm not always familiar with screenname/realname pairs.)

I counted recordings listed in the Short Works section that had more than one part/section/chapter as solo projects. (These were things like a reader reading an entire book of short stories, so that there were several pieces included.) I included short works that were part of the Short Story Collections as chapters as if they had been contributed to a group project. I counted short works that were a single piece as chapters as well. My rationale for doing so was that many of the "solo" pieces in the short work catalog should be a part of either the Short Story Collection (I think some of them were recorded before we had an official place to collect short stories) or they are non-fiction pieces that (IMHO) should be collected in a "Short Non-fiction Collection". This includes the historical documents. The organization and long-term committment usually seen in a solo project were not really present in these very short one-piece recordings, so I felt that they should be counted as chapters for the purposes of my analysis. Feel free to disagree! Also, all OL projects were counted as solo, since I did not know enough about any of the languages to understand what was said in the summaries.

And now the data!
There were 63 solo projects by 37 readers, so about 18% of readers are soloists. 19 (30%) of the solo projects were works in other languages. Solo projects were responsible for 19 of the 20 completed OL books. There was an average of 13 chapters/parts per solo project, though the length of each chapter/part varied wildly (as was also true of group projects). 14 (38%) of the solo readers have completed more than 1 solo project, (this is 7% of all readers). 12 of the readers have only solo projects (they may have poetry contributions; I did not look at poetry.) 8 solo readers read more chapters for group projects than their solo work, 27 read more for their solo work, and 3 read the same for both. The average solo reader will read 10 more chapters as part of their solo project(s) than as part of group projects.

Of the solo English books, 11 (25%) were Children's books, 10 (23%) were nonfiction, and the rest were fiction. I was unable to calculate the OL books, because I could only guess at some of the titles, and could not read any of the summaries. According to the categories on the catalog page, there are 13 (40% of group projects) Children's group projects and 2 (6%) book-length group nonfiction projects.

There were 32 group Book projects, 1 OL project, and 4 short collections, for 37 official group projects (Some chapters below are "solo" short works that were not categorized in the Short Story Collection for a variety of reasons.)

85 readers contributed 1 chapter to a group project (3 of them also did solo projects.)
44 readers contributed 2 chapters. (4 with a solo as well)
24 readers contributed 3 chapters. ( 3 with a solo)
13 readers contributed 4 chapters (2 with a solo)
30 readers conrtibuted 5 or more chapters (14 of them had solo projects.) 14 of those 30 readers contributed more than 10 chapters, and of those 14, 10 of them also had solo projects.

With 196 readers contributing to a group project, 56% contributed more than 1 chapter. Adding in the soloist chapters, 59% of volunteers contributed more than 1 chapter.

This post has been brought to you by the Corporation of Way Too Much Free Time.

Post by **hugh** » May 17th, 2006, 8:25 pm

let's be honest.

this whole project is brought to you in part by Corporation of Way Too Much Free Time, with generous support from Did I Just Spend Three Hours on the LibriVox Forum Foundation and the I Should Really Get Some Work Done, Let Me Just Check LibriVox One More Time Company. Underwriting provided by the Bank of Oh I Love That Book, I'll Just Sign Up for One Chapter.

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » May 18th, 2006, 6:35 am

*huggles Alys*

Post by **hugh** » May 18th, 2006, 6:39 am

actually alys, is that for all projects - completed and in-progress?

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » May 18th, 2006, 7:06 am

hugh wrote:actually alys, is that for all projects - completed and in-progress?

Alys wrote:Keep in mind that this data also does not reflect chapters a reader may have contributed to a book that has not been been catalogued yet.

Post by **hugh** » May 18th, 2006, 7:20 am

... you might say that librivox started on the principle: why not get someone else to read it for you!!

thanks betsie & thanks alys.

Alys · Post by **Alys** » May 18th, 2006, 7:28 pm

Because my inquiring mind wanted to know, and if I found it out anyway, I might as well share, here are the stats for poetry. (Again, NOT counting contributions that have not been catalogued yet, although new volunteers are generally better represented by the poetry category because there is a relatively quick turnaround with poetry versus books.)

136 readers have contributed a poetry piece, 50% of all volunteers (which with the addition of the poetry people, moves up to 274 individual volunteers as far as I can tell.)

67 readers (49% of poetry readers, 24% of all readers) contributed 1 poetry piece. 41 (30%, 15%) of the readers have contributed only that poetry piece.
26 readers (19% of poetry readers, 9% of all readers) contributed 5 or more poetry pieces.

Adding the poetry statistics to previous statistics, this means that 101 people have made 1 recording for Librivox (61 people have volunteered 1 chapter and 41 have volunteered 1 poetry piece) so 37% of volunteers completed 1 recording for Librviox and 63% completed more than one recording. 57 (21%) volunteers completed 5 or more recordings (whether poetry, solo, or group.)

I wish that I could look at data from uncataloged projects, as I suspect that the number of people with more than one recording would go up, but that is not likely to happen in the future. Unfortunately the "who is this?" problem is even more pronounced on the forums, with no easy way for me to connect a screenname with a catalog name. I began to make an attempt, and quickly ran into difficulty. I can suspect in some cases what a person's real name (or at least the name they use for the catalog) is, but more often than not, I'm not entirely sure, so the data would be skewed.

I hope all these numbers aren't boring people. I am constantly amazed at how many people (274 on the officially cataloged pages alone!) are willing to take the time and effort to stop and read for us and with us.

ChipDoc · Post by **ChipDoc** » May 19th, 2006, 2:34 am

The numbers are fascinating; thanks for taking the time to compile and share them, Alys! I think that the bottom line is that most folks will make only a small contribution, and that's why EVERY contribution is important.

Some folks can only give a single contribution. I welcome each and every one, whether they be small or large. Did you ever listen to Typee, by Herman Melville. It was read by Michael Scherer and the first time we heard from him was when he dropped the entire book on us already completed.

I just LOVE volunteers who come so well prepared!

Be that as it may, I really like seeing that so many folks have made a contribution. It's good to see that LibriVox has touched people in such a wonderful way!

pberinstein · Post by **pberinstein** » May 19th, 2006, 1:30 pm

You are a person after my own heart, Alys. Such lovely statistics! Thank you for doing that.

And as for Hugh, let me add the category "Feels Guilty for Not Doing More When Sees Everyone Else Contributing on a Daily Basis."

Gesine · Post by **Gesine** » May 19th, 2006, 4:01 pm

Very interesting stats, Alys...

The only way we have for matching screen names to catalogue names is this: http://librivox.org/wiki/moin.cgi/ListOfReadersCatalogNames

Stephan · Post by **Stephan** » May 19th, 2006, 5:17 pm

I am not so much a number-guy. I admit that i have read the thread only very inattentive because all that text and numbers are a bit detering to me. Yes, I am too lazy to interpret the numbers.

Chip already summed up a bit in a way that was understandable to me.
Any other "bottomlines" out of this that could be said each in one sentence?

Great job Alys, finding out stuff about ones project will never be in vain (i.e. us knowing more about Librivox).

ceastman · Post by **ceastman** » May 19th, 2006, 7:54 pm

pberinstein wrote:You are a person after my own heart, Alys. Such lovely statistics! Thank you for doing that.

And as for Hugh, let me add the category "Feels Guilty for Not Doing More When Sees Everyone Else Contributing on a Daily Basis."

Ohhhh yessss Paula... Today's Librivoxing has gotten shoved back till now, 'cos I just had too darned much stuff to do at work!

Wow Alys. Quite an impressive bit of work you did!

-Catharine