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OK, here we go: Visualising the #Worldcon #Hugo2024 voting results.

Alternative Title: Why ranked voting matters.

As a quick explanation, the last placed candidate in each round is eliminated and their votes transferred to the next candidate on each ballot.

This is the first place ballot only, the second place is calculated by treating the winner as eliminated and rerunning the election. I have not included the final round runoff against "No Award" as this year that's all uninteresting.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

Doing this in reverse order of the announcements on the night, because you were going to scroll straight to the best novel anyway weren't you?

Relatively uninteresting compared to some others: "Some Desperate Glory" starts out in first and stays there. A good start for "The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi" but it's just not getting the transfers from other books as they're eliminated.

Mostly an SF/Fantasy split I think, but surprised by the number of Witch King transfers to Translation State

Eddie Cochrane reshared this.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

Best Novella next.

Lots of first round votes for "Seeds of Mercury" but just doesn't get the transfers that "Thornhedge" does. Pretty obvious language/country split here, but a very good demonstration of how a lot of people voting for one thing first doesn't mean it'll win. This is why Sad Puppies couldn't win anything.

This one broke the graphs!

Eddie Cochrane reshared this.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

Best Novelette. I don't have much to say about this one, it's about as simple as it gets. Ranked voting or straight first-past-the-post would make no difference.

Eddie Cochrane reshared this.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

I'll group the less interesting ones together to save time: Best Short Story, Best Series.

Eddie Cochrane reshared this.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

Best Graphic Story is wild. I have no idea what's going on here. I'd guess it's something stylistic/genre based but I don't know much about this.

Lots of transfers from Witches of WWII to Wonder Woman bumps it up early one, but then Wonder Woman fails to get any further significant transfers. Three Body Problem starts first but Saga 11 eventually wins on transfers.

Eddie Cochrane reshared this.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

The two Best Dramatic Presentation awards.

Short form looks messy but it's not surprising when you delve into it: Doctor Who transfers to Doctor who and Star Trek to Star Trek.

Long form was close, but Nimona transfers to D&D over Spider-Man are unsurprising.

(I need to recheck best related work, something has gone wrong in the data - there were odd voting patterns for this one and it may have found an edge case in my code)

Eddie Cochrane reshared this.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

Best Game, Best Editor short and long form.

Best game wasn't even close. They didn't need to run all the rounds because it already had over half the votes!

Eddie Cochrane reshared this.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

And Lodestar and Astounding awards, which aren't Hugos.

Credit to @ajlanes for suggesting visualising the data like this, and @nwhyte and the team for some very prompt release of the detailed #Hugos2024 data. Running the votes for this much data is a major task!

reshared this

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

at first I looked at semiprozine like the name of a pharmaceutical drug.
in reply to Zoë O'Connell

1984 - the winner was no surprise to the few of us who saw the returned ballots.
It's often hard to predict the winner - the transfers are the confounding factor.
in reply to Zoë O'Connell

why is it unsurprising to you? Because it's both Fantasy (mostly) rather than SF?
in reply to Myrion

@myrion People who like Nimona and D&D more likely to be less Marvel/DC mega-franchise consumers and more into niche stuff. FSVO "Niche" that manages to include D&D.

At least that's my gut feeling about them.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

@happydisciple I'd never heard of Sankey diagrams before, but oh my, what a wonderful visualisation method. So much information, yet so crystal clear. Finally grokking how Hugo voting played out by studying these diagrams made me inordinately happy. Many thanks for doing this, @zoe.
in reply to Leo Breebaart

@Leo Breebaart @Jos Dingjan @Zoë O'Connell I think I first encountered something similar in diagrams showing the evolution of the US political parties like this one si.edu/object/nmah_527958
in reply to Leo Breebaart

@leo @happydisciple
Locus has been printing the numbers for a long. long time. It's harder to visualize, but not impossible.
in reply to Chris is.

@offby1 Obviously I’m not Zoe, but the graphs link to sankeymatic.com at the bottom ☺️
in reply to John Coxon

@John Coxon @Chris is. @Zoë O'Connell And input for that generated from the Hugo Administrator's Report data tables by a python script.
in reply to Chris is.

@offby1 @ajlanes @johncoxon It’s a copy-paste from the PDF into a text file, then a python script that converts that into votes in each round in a format suitable for Sankeymatic.

Plan to tidy it up and stick on GitHub in the next few days.

(Input data does need some manual tidying up to remove the final runoff round and deal with weird PDF ligatures)

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

@offby1 @ajlanes @johncoxon Source code now at github.com/zoeimogen/hugo-sank…. (Still adding to it, particularly source data, but substantially done code-wise)
in reply to Zoë O'Connell

Chinese reposts FYI:

weibo.com/5726230680/OsoEft92c
weibo.com/5726230680/OsoEE0UWe

The poster is one of my Chinese friends, although he found these without me telling him about them (I imagine he got them from File 770).

Reposters include another of my friends who was a Hugo finalist last year and this; and the academic who was the author of the ineligible BRW last year, due to one contributor being on the Hugo team (although no longer by the time the con actually happened).

in reply to ErsatzCulture

Thanks - hadn’t realised I’d made today’s Pixel Scroll!
This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to Zoë O'Connell

One of my other friends was even inspired to copy your methodology to do BRW.

weibo.com/7504217178/OsrmwCDsL (third image in that post)

I'll email him to see if he has a higher resolution version of that image, and if so, edit it into this post. EDIT: here's the horrifically long URL for the sankeymatic.com page: sankeymatic.com/build/?i=PTAEF…

This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to ErsatzCulture

@ErsatzCulture
Sorry for coming late. Just finished my account creation; still getting familiar with this novel platform between tweaking my own data.

I've developed some Excel formulae to help generating the text inputs to SankeyMATIC. Attaching a sample w/ src, FYI. It's still for BRW, but today I improved my Excel to analyze the compititions for the first three standings (instead of just the first place)

Thanks to @ErsatzCulture 's invitation and @zoe 's inspiration and sharing!

in reply to prograft

@prograft @ErsatzCulture Is the "nil" entry to force the display positions to be correct? I gave up on it in the end, the graph will always look wrong on strict ordering when there are no transfers from No Award. (eg github.com/zoeimogen/hugo-sank…)
in reply to Zoë O'Connell

@ErsatzCulture

Exactly. That is the least ugly workaround I can find. I wrote a logic branch specifically for this.

in reply to Zoë O'Connell

Coming to this *very* late , while retrospectively reading my voters pack ... it's interesting how the repeated run off for minor places yields quite different results to reverse elimination order. Novella in particular.