My zoo survey is now CLOSED, thank you so much to everyone who filled it out!! I'm kind of sad to close it honestly, but there has to be a deadline haha. There was a total of 414 responses when I closed it, I'm just amazed at how many people saw it and shared it and responded. I initially just made this for the fun of it to see what kind of answers I would get, I had no idea it would get this much attention. Thanks so, so much to everyone who filled it out and spread the word.
This is a lot of data to sort through, so it's going to take a while to organize it, but I really look forward to sorting it and putting it together into a post to share with everyone. There have been so many interesting answers and perspectives, and I was surprised that it only got "trolled" (someone going through and putting anti-zoo answers) once, and it was pretty half-hearted. Someone who recently answered said they discovered some more about themselves taking and thinking about the survey, and I think I learned more about myself, too.
Thanks especially to Tundrovyy-Volk for posting the link in the zoo subreddit sidebar (most of the people who answered found it through reddit!), 1gaydog for helping me out with developing questions and giving me feedback, and fearlof for posting the link to a forum and sharing the survey with some people who aren't active online.
A lot of people have said they're excited to see the results, and even though it's going to be a hell of a project organizing it all, I really am too. I really can't thank everyone enough. I felt so alone just earlier this year, but now here are over four hundred people who feel similar to how I do. My tumblr just reached almost 10,000 hits recently too. This is just so amazing to me and I can't wait to share the results with you all. Thanks so much, everybody.
If you made any mistakes, clicked wrong answers, want answers removed, or anything like that, please shoot me a message here or on tumblr and I'll sort it out for you.
Results will be posted to my tumblr blog as soon as I can get it all organized. I'll be posting the link to the results to here, knotty, and ZF as well. The survey page itself will be updated with a link to the results, too.
I can't wait. Thanks for doing this.
If you need any help crunching the numbers let me know...
I'm excited to see the results! Could you also post a link to the data set if and when it's convenient? 414 responses is a lot, and there's a lot of cool analysis that could be done, especially with a statistical programming language like R.
Matlab FTW!
Eww, but you have to pay for matlab.
Well, I guess you technically don't have to pay. But they want you to.
Engage hardmode and do it all in Excel :P
Oh, we have either a masochistic nerd or the standard issue cubicle slave from around the 2000's here.
FIRES UP ENIAC
I need you help me push a lot of cables around...
Definitely masochistic nerd :P
puts a load of electronic bulbs and cables in your hands
K, get your slide rule, too, for counterchecking the machine!
I'm a physicist, so my style is more flailing randomly at something, saying "OK, I think I know what went wrong there" then resuming flailing in a very similar but subtly different way.
That and creating really, really nice graphs.
Oh god, I love that comment. I am in technology, so I mostly produce sleek graphs where you can point to a peak and say: "Obviously, this is the best ..."
And due to my basic schooling from way back then, my favorite inside joke is to perform percussive maintenance on things that went wrong :P
Or, while we are at it: If an airplane lost radar and collided with a mountain, it didn't crash, no, the system became kinetically challenged.
I believe you mean, "We attempted to correct the radar malfunction by applying percussive maintenance to the airplane's fuselage."
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It's on a spreadsheet on Google Docs, I'm not sure how to share that without also ending up sharing my email/Google account... I'm new to Google Docs, not sure how all of it works. Is there another place I can host/share spreadsheets online?
I am no user of any Google service, but surely, there must be a way to export the data in a convenient file format. Spreadsheets would call for Excel, e.g. But all those are pretty freely convertible from then on. You should do that for backup alone. Also, from those files you can remove the personal ID data.
Okay, I figured out I can export it to an Excel file. I could remove any personal info and then upload the Excel file to a file-sharing site, if that would work?
One thing I'd like to do but I'm not sure how would be to see how many people who are involved in each zoo website label themselves. Like, how many people who came from tumblr use zoosexual, how many from ZF, how many people from reddit are fetish folk, that kind of thing. But I'm not sure how I'd get those numbers except sorting the answers manually myself and then getting percentages.
Well, wait a second - first I think we should perhaps have such a discussion in private if it goes to itty bitty details for reasons.
And second, you must be careful of the metadata in fileheads. I am not sure of Excel files, but please look up how to remove such ID data from Excel files on the internet in detail - just to make sure.
After that hosting it somewhere could work, BUT once again, you have to check what you promised people on your data handling. Is there answers to certain questions that are too personal? Did you state in the beginning that the data will be accessible? Is it truly anonymous? Or would you only hand out a copy of anonymized data to those who ask you in person so you can at least keep track of where it goes?
Do you have the data where everyone came from recorded in connection to the set of answers? If yes, this is easily done even in Excel now already with a Pivot table.
A lot of the technical stuff is going way over my head, I've never done anything like this before and I only know some basics in Excel. Where someone found the survey was one of the questions, so it's on the spreadsheet with the rest of the answers.
There aren't any very personal answers really, and people who read my post at the start of it knew any answers were going to be shared when I publish the results. Some people did leave ways to contact them, which I'll remove when I post those. Now that I'm thinking about it more I don't think it'd be a good idea to share the raw data around, just because even though I said the answers would be published, I don't think sharing like that is what a lot of people would have in mind. I wouldn't want to do anything that would make anyone who answered uncomfortable. I'm talking some with one person privately who has experience organizing data, and a friend I trust has offered to help as well if I need it. I think I should limit it to that. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to organize most of it myself and get the most important statistics down, which is what I said I'd do to start out with. If I want to find out a statistic (like the one I mentioned that I'm trying to figure out) maybe I can ask for help without sharing the actual data.
Yup, best of luck, we are all waiting for the nice graphs :)
If I had the handle on this one, I'd copy the original several times, stow it away. And then have one that is 'anonymized', manually going through it to make sure would be necessary. That one would go only to people with credentials requesting if they can have that for scientific study.
And if it's all nicely in a big table in Excel now, Pivot tables will be a good friend of yours for some questions.
Ponysmoocher has the right idea.
In Google Docs, select File->Download As->Comma-Separated Values. This saves the spreadsheet in a format that looks like this:
This is type of file is called a CSV file, and it's a really common way to share spreadsheet data. Each value (e.g. 1, a, z) is the value of a cell in the spreadsheet. Each row in the CSV file represents a row in the spreadsheet. The commas represent the boundaries between the cells.
Programs like Microsoft Excel can read CSV files and generate a new spreadsheet from them. Programming languages like Matlab, R, and Python can also read CSVs, which makes CSV files a really convenient format for number-crunching.
Best of all, CSVs are readable by humans, so you won't even need to share your Google account to share the file! Once you've downloaded the file from Google Docs, just open it in Notepad and copy-paste the contents onto Pastebin. Then share the Pastebin link on reddit, and the rest of us can get it from there :)
You would want to use the windows version of Excel since the one for the Mac does not seem to be updated as much. Plus openoffice which is good for 99% of the things would not be the best thing if you are using advanced functions, like nested references and/or nested functions. Also NEVER copy and paste directly from one microsoft application to another, except note pad because it might hang and then after it hangs you might get an error or you might have to control-alt-delete out of it
I can't wait to see the results; very well done /u/Battlecrops. :D
Glad I could help out. ;)
Awesome! Can't wait to see the results, 414 is a bunch of people.