Saturday, October 13, 2012

Crowdsourced Q&A #1: Brony Study


A tribute to Brony Study by ~KryptidAnimals on deviantART

We blog moderators here at EqM have been chatting about the possibility of organizing Q&As with various constituent groups and individuals in the brony community. But these will be Q&As with a twist. We will be collecting our questions from you, our commenters, right in the comments section!

For our first Q&A, we will be collecting questions for Dr. Redden and Dr. Edwards, the scientists working on the Brony Study research project. These two scientists, with the eager aid of tens of thousands of bronies, have collected an incredible amount of data about the brony community (since very early on in the brony community's existence, when compared to studies of other online communities). This data set has helped them test the veracity of many early-forming stereotypes about the brony community as well as create a typology to help describe and interpret the brony community, and maybe one day it will yield hints about the nature of the earliest phases of community formation on the internet: a notoriously difficult area to study. Dr Redden and Dr Edwards are currently preparing for their "longitudinal study", an experiment where they will collect data over the course of a few years to gain insights into how the brony community changes over time.

So if you have any questions for Dr. Redden and Dr. Edwards, please leave them in the comments below! Also if you don't have IntenseDebate or just don't want to comment here, there is now a thread up on Ponychan for anonymous commenting.