Recs organization

[doranwen]

I realized I had a question about how to organize recs and thought "where can I ask it?" Of course, the answer was "at fictional_fans". :)

If you're looking through a recs list for a fandom, one which is more than just a tiny handful of fics, how do you want to see the fics ordered? By the main ship(s)? By where it occurs in canon? Does it depend on what the canon is? (For instance, I could imagine fic recs for a TV show might be more useful organized by where each appears in the show, compared to those for a film.) Do you like to see both ways, depending on what you're looking for? (e.g. anything that features your favorite ship vs. fics set within the first season only because you've not seen the rest yet) (I presumed that within those two categorization methods, one would organize the fics by author and then title.)

See, I'd set up my master recs post by fandom, and the posts for each fandom large enough to get its own post (or more than one), I organized by ship. The biggest one (which required four separate posts to get them all in) being a series of movies where at least half the fics are shippy for a single pairing, I figured that made the most sense. But my fic database *does* let me tag fics for their position in canon (and I do that for each fic), so it's quite possible for me to set up posts organized by "times" such as "pre-film 1", "post-film 1", "during film 2", "AU", "distant past", "future", "multi", "indeterminate", etc. Whether I *should* do so or not was the question I could not answer, because I don't know whether people would want to browse fics that way.

Note that for a post organized by time in canon, all fics would also be marked with which major ships were present, they just wouldn't be *grouped* together by ship. The reverse would not be true, however - at least, I haven't marked times for individual fics in any post yet. I *could*, though. (Possibly relevant - of the other four fandoms which got their own posts, two are TV shows, one's a film, and one's a film and book combo where the two mediums were similar enough that I combined them into one post.)

So I welcome your input. (If you never read recs posts at all, I'd also be curious to know why.)

Comments

[doranwen]

And note that I mark only *exceptionally* well-written - emphasis on the exceptionally. So much of whether a fic is written well (besides the obvious SPAG quality) slots under YMMV, so I couldn't get more granular than "these fics have an extra wow factor in the way they're written, to me". Many of the other fics are quite well-written, they just didn't have the wow factor. So I just figure people will have to read and decide what they think is well-written or not, but there is a minimum personal tolerance of writing quality, as I put it, lol. Below that I don't bother to save a fic. (The other reason some fics aren't saved has to do with ships or themes present in them, but I've rejected far more fics for my database due to poor writing quality than for ships or themes I don't care for. That might change with some fandoms, though! I don't always like the most popular ship.)

I gave up on AO3 a long time ago because I had so many fics from so many places - LJ, Tumblr, old sites that may or may not exist only in the Wayback Machine, lol, etc. - and I didn't see an easy way to organize all the fics in one spot. Not only that, but the other sites generally have poor to nonexistent tagging systems (ff.n's is anemic compared to AO3, and that's the best of the others that I can think of). And even the fic on AO3 has very inconsistent tagging because everyone's tagging methods are idiosyncratic. Someone might mark Choose Not to Warn for a major character death and yet *I* want to have that noted in my organization!

So the more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed my own database to make things easy to find and more consistently tagged. (I was having the trouble of "what was that one where X happens" and an author/title organizational system does NOT help with finding fics like that!) So I taught myself how to build a database (with lots of help from volunteers on the OpenOffice forums) and built one. It's only been in the past year or two that I've been experimenting with creating recs posts from it, and have some awesome SQL queries that will pull fics with all manner of combinations of restrictions on fandoms, major ships, characters, themes, etc. Currently I've got over 1700 fics in the database and that's only the beginning - there are soooo many larger fandoms I want to add eventually, like the LOTR and Narnia and L&C and SV fics I have saved. (Another bonus is I can put in the link to the saved fic on my hard drive so I can launch a fic from the database itself.) I'd be farther except the Yahoo Groups project's been sucking up all my free time. *sigh*

Yeah, organizing by time works for several of the fandom posts I have up (so I'm posting new posts that will give readers the option of "how do I want to browse the fics"), but I realized for Fried Green Tomatoes, it didn't make much sense, so I won't be posting that fandom by time/length as well. I'll play it by ear, I guess. For longer fics where I put them tends to be the jumping off point - a lot of them diverge from canon then - and *how* I categorize time depends on the fandom as well. For a TV show like FBI, for instance, I generally have fics by episode, a general S1, a post-S1, etc., an AU category (for fics that diverge before the show begins in some way), and so on. And I always have an "indeterminate" one for fics that aren't necessarily located in a specific time, and "multi" for ones that span multiple times (ficlet collections or "five times this happened" fit into that). It tends to work out pretty well. But for something like LOTR (which I have not added to the db yet except for a tiny handful of crossovers), I'd group things more like First Age, Second Age, Third Age pre-Ring War, Third Age during Ring War, Third Age post-Ring War, Fourth Age & beyond, etc. With Push (a sci-fi film) I set the time categories as pre-film, during film, post-film (within the first year after), future (several years or more after the film), and of course the AU and multi and indeterminate that I end up using for just about every fandom. I generally don't have much trouble with finding a spot for each fic.

[beatrice_otter]

I like pinboard, for bookmarking. You can tag everything in a lot of different ways, and make things public so share.

[doranwen]

Yeah, I didn't know about the bookmarking external works at the time (whoever I asked didn't mention that possibility), but I think I would've been dissatisfied with that, now that I can do what I really want. And I can write queries that will pull combinations of all sorts of criteria. For instance, I can write a query to pull the Matrix fics which have Neo/Trinity as a major ship but which do NOT have angst, and which are over 1k. That's 4 things I'm setting in that example query - fandom, major ship, excluding a theme, and limiting by wordcount. I can restrict by multiple themes at a time, too. That kind of granularity you can't get with anything other than a database. Probably overkill for most people, but I *love* that kind of control over information, to be able to demand a specific selection and get it. The cool thing is it means that if there's someone who has some specific DNWs they need to control for, I can do that and present them with an entire list they can read with no problems.

Aww, I know the "why did I wait so long" feeling. In my case, most of the fandoms I've gotten into were either fairly small even in their heyday, or were too late for Yahoo Groups to have much on them (and yet the fandom is dead now). Alas!

Hey, when we get to the tagging, we can definitely use help by people who know those fandoms! Every last group has to be tagged *before* they get sorted and uploaded, so if you're at all interested, please consider joining the Discord so you'll be alerted when tagging starts. (Though if you don't do Discord, you can always subscribe to my DW as I'll definitely post there, or follow the Yahoo-Geddon Tumblr.) We need so much fandom knowledge (and languages, too), as I'm seeing tons of groups for fandoms I'd never heard of before. It'll go far faster if we have people who know the fandoms checking over them and tagging. I should have some tabs ready to go in around three months. (Yes, it'll take that long to finish fixing the mojibake in the metadata. *sigh*)

Interesting, I'd never thought of location! I don't think I'd find it that useful, but I might create some themes that I only use with specific fandoms to tag for stuff like that. Like, LOTR tends to be pretty location-driven depending on which races of characters you focus on. Assuming one sticks with Third Age fics (the other ages are generally Silmfic), there's tons of hobbit fic, elven fic, the human fic is split into Rohan vs. Gondor vs. Dúnedain of the North, generally, and I suppose there's also dwarf fic. And even with the elven stuff, you've got at least three different locations that the fics can be focused on (Rivendell, Lothlórien, and Mirkwood). I'll probably need to add a theme just for each race/location, because they're like a half dozen different fandoms rolled into one, each location feeling so individual that a lot of people tend to enjoy one or two but not the others. (Me, I love the human fic best, then hobbit, elven, and dwarf in that order. But I'll generally try reading anything LOTR as long as it fits some of my other criteria.)

[doranwen]

Would you believe, I didn't think about major vs. minor ships and characters until I'd added nearly 1000 fics into the database? Then I went back and added in the four tables necessary to make that work (one each for minor ships and minor chars, and one each to be the junction tables between those and the fanfics table, because of the many-to-many relationship). Took a ton of work but I'm glad I did, as it makes it way easier to decide how to tag fics when I add them, and gives that extra functionality.

Thanks! I hope I'll be able to finish in the three months I estimated - I wish I could snap my fingers and get it done so badly but there's no path other than the long slog so I keep going (there are 1.1 million groups in the metadata - over 960k of which we actually saved data for - so that is a LOT of rows to fix encoding in, and it's not something I can outsource to anyone else due to several reasons). I'm not sure which of the two newcomers you are, so don't mind me greeting you as I usually do any new potential volunteers joining the server. :)

I'm afraid mostly what you'll see me post these days… are the recs posts, LOL. I have a few prepped and ready to go, organized by time and length per the discussion here, but I make good use of cuts so hopefully they won't clog up your reading page. XD But when I get done with the metadata fixing, I'll make a post about it on DW as well.