I am not ruling out any future interviews with media marathoners, but it appears that I have achieved discourse saturation. The discourse corpus contains a lot of interesting and insightful information from marathoners that I’m working on coding, and new threads have not emerged from recent interviews.
Thus far, the media marathoning team has collected marathoning information from 176 participants! This number includes anonymous participants in our three Survey Monkeys (one each for books, TV, and film; N=116), individual interviews (N=32), book focus groups (N=17), and marathon journal keepers (N=11).
With all of this information gathered, I now have a clearer picture of our commonly marathoned texts. Here they are in rank order:
Book Series (with 3 or more marathoners)
- Hunger Games (N=45)
- Twilight (N=23)
- Harry Potter (N=20)
- Millennium Series (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) (N=10)
- A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) (N=8)
- 50 Shades of Gray (N=4)
- Lord of the Rings (N=3)
- Outlander (N=3)
Film Series (with 3 or more marathoners)
- Lord of the Rings (N=19)
- Harry Potter (N=18)
- Star Wars (N=17)
- Indiana Jones (N=6)
- Toy Story (N=5)
- Avengers (N=3)
- Back to the Future (N=3)
- Godfather (N=3)
- James Bond (N=3)
TV Series (with 4 or more marathoners)
- Dexter (N=11)
- Arrested Development (N=9)
- Glee (N=9)
- Weeds (N=9)
- True Blood (N=8)
- Battlestar Galactica (N=7)
- Mad Men (N=6)
- 24 (N=5)
- Buffy (N=5)
- Firefly (N=5)
- How I Met Your Mother (N=5)
- Gossip Girl (N=4)
- Jersey Shore (N=4)
- The League (N=4)
- Law and Order SVU (N=4)
- Lost (N=4)
- Walking Dead (N=4)
The book list didn’t hold many surprises for me–although I did not expect such high numbers for Hunger Games. The numbers mean that 25% of our marathoners had marathoned the Hunger Games books!
The film list was also somewhat predictable. The only surprise for me was that The Matrix didn’t crack the top ten.
I expect that the television list is much more fickle than the film and book lists. We would likely see different results if we ran a poll in 2013 (compared to 2012) because of streaming releases, new seasons starting, new DVD releases. For example, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, and House of Cards likely would have made the list if we conducted the survey now. (Both had a few marathoners, but not enough to make the cut off.) I also expect that Walking Dead’s numbers are higher now.
What surprises do you see? What texts are trending now?
After assisting Dr. Perks at Nazareth last year, my ears have been open to else doing personal marathoning. Newhouse graduate students at Syracuse University meet weekly to watch Castle, something to add to the list?
Others that seem popular are Pretty Little Liars, Greys Anatomy, Sons of Anarchy, Friends, Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, The Walking Dead, Upstairs Downstairs (starting 2010 remake) and Boardwalk Empire
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