So this past week in class we talked about our research projects. We went over some different ways to do them, and I believe the approach that we were told most of us would be taking and is the one I am, is a pragmatic proposal. Our proposals are given, and we support them accordingly with our research and what it all means.

Therefore, in following of my previous two blog posts, I am continuing with my gender ratio in top books research.

To start with, what books are to be used as my “top books”? Where will the questions end? (Not there apparently) I’ve decided to use the New York Times Best Sellers as my source. It is quite restricting on my data, I know, but it’s a place to start and a restriction I am willing to work with. If the restriction isn’t clear as to what is being restricted, its that The NYT only caters to a certain and select group of people, and may focus their book selection to those relative to them. So my research data just got restricted from possibly being worldwide to just what The NYT decided is their “Best Sellers”.

Moving on, now that I have the source of what book list I will be using, they have many options so I need to look further into what list will be the source of my data. For this, I chose “Combined Print & E-Book Fiction” because why not? Well, I do have a reason for it, but saying ‘why not’ and just going for it would be so much simpler. The reason for combined print and e-book is because we now live in a digital age. There are so many devices out there today that you can read a book, and made only for that purpose that I don’t even know what they are. I can tell you I can read a book on my iPad, but that can do a whole bunch more. There are devices dedicated to books and only books, and I don’t even know what they are called because each company has one of their own with its own cool name. As for the Fiction selection, I believe that with fiction you can do so much more with your writing, so your character base is limitless. So with more freedom, you can give the reader what they want, and that is exactly what I want to look at. What the reader wants, leads to what they like. What they like is based on factors of the book, and the factor I am looking at is the mtf ratio. Ta Daa!

So my list has been selected. Now to start collecting all the data. Shouldn’t be too hard. Haha jk. The NYT Best Sellers gives you the top five per week all year, and I only see one button that goes back one week at a time. So let me just add a few more restrictions to my data and see what happens. Lets go with the top five books twice a year (Frist week of January and July). That would be 10 books a year, over a decade, is about exactly 100 books. Well, that’s a lot of data to collect. And finding the gender ratio in all of them is going to be so much fun.

Well no delay here…except one. I have my list, and my restrictions on it. I’ve figured out how to manipulate the url of The NYT site to jump from each year to the next instead of going week by week. What could be the issue? “YOU HAVE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH.” Ha, you think I’m paying for this. College student over here. Aren’t you so cute thinking you are going to get money out of me. Just an fyi NYT, the last person who tried that, stole my debit card and got denied on their first transaction.

This is where I activate my college student ability to get data without paying for it. Aka, go to bed and hit up the library when I get time this week. I’m pretty sure I get access to the NYT for free from our library. If not then we will move on to my next method of Plan C…as soon as I come up with plan C.