Category Archives: About the Anthology

We are all beavering away on the submissions – and our editors a busy reading, and rereading. Only a few weeks away until the shortlist is done and authors are notified.

Being a numbers girl, I couldn’t resist the urge to delve into the statistics around the photos short story submitters selected (I’m a sad case,I know). I promise you this is not a completely boring blog, and there is only one graph.

When we set up the site, the photos were organised into 10 different categories. We aimed to offer authors 100 photos, to give a good range of topics and subjects. We uploaded 114 photos, and here’s how they were allocated out category wise.

Beach 32,    Events 10,   Forest 9,    Entertainment 14,   Structures 12,  Kids 4,  Action 13, Work 10,   Animals 5,  Art 5

By far the most popular category for authors was Beach. Not surprising given that it is the Gold Coast. There could also  be a chicken and egg thing going on here – there were more beach photos to choose from, so you would expect there would be more beach photos selected. But then beach is so firmly embedded in our culture, even if we aren’t all surfies. Our Forest category was the next best  represented with stories, followed by Events.

 

Looking at the pie chart to the right (click on it for a closed look), you can see that 51% of the stories are about our natural environment – beach or forest. The natural landscape does define a lot about who we are.  If you did this in other Australian cities would that still be the case?  Or is that a feature of more Regional Cities – Darwin, Canberra and the like?  What would a Sydney,  Melbourne or Brisbane profile look like?  Is it simply about what we did as kids, and then what we do with our own kids?

 

 

 

The column graph left (click to enlarge)  compares the number of photos authors selected in each category (green) with the number in that category’s photo set (blue). Did I say only one graph? This one’s a bonus!

 

 

But most importantly, the photo blue ribbon for most popular shot  goes to Beach 15, the View from Rainbow bay looking across the Coral sea, a lone surfer in the ocean, with Surfers in the background, C. 1990. There’s that surfer theme! The photographer was Ray Sharpe – a well  known local and a  professional photographer. And, here it is!

The second most popular photo is the image of kids and lorikeets at Currumbin, c.1980, photographer unknown.

There you have it – still awake?  Many of the photos were selected by more than one author.  It’s so interesting to see the different stories one photo can inspire.

Overall, I feel we did pretty well with the selection.  We are very grateful to Kyla Stephan and the staff at Gold Coast council’s Local Studies library for there assistance on this.  My next mission is to look at the photo preference by genre – need to delve a bit further for that one!

So many questions come to mind as I look at the data.

• How do you think we went with the photos we offered for authors?
• In which categories would you liked to have seen more photos?
• Did we miss any categories ?
• Would you have liked to see more contemporary photos?
• Was there a specific sort of photo you were looking for …. If only they had a photo of this?

Let  us know your thoughts as a comment – either on this blog, Facebook, or a Tweet!