Clicky
In a poorly-disguised attempt to keep this thread from locking, I wanted to post an update here for those few of you who showed interest in this back when I first posted it. Now might be a good time to look into this again, as I have been adding to the database consistently since I started, and it now has over 500 entries. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge number, but a few things are starting to come into focus and I thought some of you might be interested. So, I'd encourage you to check out the spreadsheet now to see how things are developing. A list of things that have been added since I originally publicized the project:
- New tags, including "Live action", "Long", "Short", and "Video game" for helping to track specific types of media other than anime used in some AMVs, as well as providing a quick reference for AMV length in tag form. (As ever, specific definitions for each of these tags is provided in the "Tag definitions.doc" document in the ZIP file).
- A "Duration" column has been added in the List worksheet, which provides the length of each video in seconds...this has been one of the more interesting things added, as I'll explain below.
- A "Duration" worksheet has been added to start analyzing trends in video duration. Again, see below for my comments.
- Added an "average-by-year" of my personal ratings in the Refined Data worksheet. This probably won't interest the general public much but it's helped me to see that I'm not quite as cynical as I thought I was.
- Added a "Notes" column to the List worksheet. This has actually been quite useful, it allows me to make personal notes on various videos, as well as general notes for observers (i.e. if a video is YouTube-only, or if it is a Vault video with limited information available).
- Changelog.txt has been added to the ZIP file which shows what specific videos are being added to the list each week, as well and other changes made to the documents since the last weekly update.
As it was the last time I commented, there's still a relatively small number of videos in the list when you consider how many videos have been uploaded to the .org overall, but some stuff has come to light, specifically in regards to video duration, that will probably not change too much as more videos are added. Check it out:
Not too surprising, but cool nonetheless. This basically shows a general downward trend in video duration over the last 15 years. Of course, and I can't stress it enough,
there aren't very many videos per year, so take this with a huge grain of salt, but I predict as I go on this trend will be confirmed, and down the road might even become more extreme. It's already somewhat confirmed in my mind by the fact that there are three separate years which have comparable numbers of videos (2002, 2007, and 2014) and the difference between then and now is pretty unmistakable. Also, I do believe that in the case of duration the sampling is pretty close to random, as there's no bias in my watching shorter videos vs. longer videos.
This is a little bit more unexpected, at least for me. This shows a similar breakdown of average video length, but this time by genre. It's no surprise to me that parody, comedy, dance and fun videos are shorter than drama, romance, sentimental, and serious videos, but it does surprise me that action videos are tending to the higher end of the spectrum. The most surprising thing, though, is that last bar, the one I've so eloquently entitled "FXgasm".
"FXgasm" is a tag in the database, not a genre, but I was interested how it compared so I added it. These are the videos that put effects on display throughout the duration of the video; basically, these are the videos that were made just to show off effects work, and everything else was (in most cases) secondary. I'm honestly quite surprised to find that FXgasm videos are the
longest videos on average, as I would have expected exactly the opposite. It'll be interesting to see how that develops as more and more videos are added to the database as well, but I'd expect these figures to polarize as time goes on, rather than even out.
Anyway! Just thought I'd share. I'm loving this project, and enjoying it every step of the way. I'll keep you updated as more and more things come to light. In the meantime, if you feel like following the development of the project, I do post occasionally about it specifically on my blog,
subculture diaries. If you just want the Genome Project-specific entries, click
here. So far there's only one entry, but I'll be updating it occasionally as I come across things worth posting.
