cimorene

(Big version here)

Please click for the bigger version. This is based on data taken from two polls performed by

thefourthvine, with the data in my tables taken out on 22 Feb 2009.

This plot follows the same format as my earlier graph here, which, of course, did not have any Science behind it, only me squinting at the screen and placing the dots by the seat of my pants. I've reversed the axes in this one, however, so that better-written canons are at the top of the graph and gayer ones to the right this time. I prefer placing slashiness and quality on the two axes so that there's one data point per show and one show per data point, which lets the interaction be more easily seen.

(ETA: The clearest example of skewing I see on the plot is Highlander. LOTR might be skewed, too, by people's childhood memories or something, I guess. But Highlander? Look at it! IT HAS THE SAME QUALITY SCORE AS SGA. I'm pretty sure that it's not just my personal... weirdness, or whatever, that wants to ROFL at that. SGA is bad, but it's not that bad.)

It should be noted that mean is only one measure of central tendency and, at these sample sizes - which is to say they're all rather small but they vary from fandom to fandom - it's important to look at the others as well. To that end, here is the table I used to generate the graph:

(big version here)

Median and mode (ie, the most popular rating) are just as interesting as mean in their own ways. Scanning down the standard deviation columns, a few of those numbers will jump out as extremely large, representing a much higher degree of disagreement on the rating in question: the slashiness of Supernatural (no surprise where the primary pairing is incest) and the quality of Merlin (I'm kind of at a loss for this one but there it is), for example.

It's well worth checking out the results in the two posts of

thefourthvine's where I took the data because you can easily see the bell curves for some questions, and distinguish others where the distribution shows much higher or lower consensus. (The Science of Slashiness & Moar Science!)