Blog: Survey Completed

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Thanks very much indeed to everyone who filled in my Judge Dredd survey, which has just closed to submissions. I was hoping for about 50 responses but, what with one thing and another and some very helpful Internet Publicising by various delightful people, it ended up having just over 200! This is GRATE for Engagement and Information Gathering, though it does mean it's going to take me a while to do the DATA CLEANING, although this is not a bad problem to have!

When I first tried this out, gathering data about Doctor Doom a couple of years ago, one issue that cropped up at this stage was that people REALLY wanted to demonstrate how much they knew. On the one hand this is EXCELLENT because it means they're willing to fill in a form, but on the other it made life much more difficult for me because it meant I had loads of very long NARRATIVE answers to code e.g. instead of saying that Doom's appearance was "hood, mask, belt" or similar it would be more like "as far as I'm aware he has a sort of cloak or cowl, which is usually green, but that's not always the case. The first time I ever saw himn was..." and so on.

It's lovely that people want to share this sort of thing, but I was very conscious that it wasn't hugely useful to the data, and so they were spending time on it they didn't need to. Also, I didn't have time to read and/or ENGAGE with all of this on a personal level, so it felt slightly RUDE that I was just ignoring it. THUS this time around I moved the order around a bit, so people had a chance to demonstrate their awareness of Judge Dredd right at the start, and then gave examples of how they could answer the main questions that, I hoped, were clearer about the sort of thing I was after.

It didn't work at all! Looking through the answers there's a LOT of stuff there about what Judge Dredd means to them, people's opinions about various versions, and personal reminiscences - all good stuff, but again it makes me feel like the guy from Wendy's in the "Sir This Is A Wendy's" MEME. Actually, I've just looked this up to see if I've used the MEME correctly, and the SECOND example out of thousands is pretty much exactly what's going on!

All of which is to say THANKS again to everyone who took the time to fill in all of these responses, and APOLOGIES to all of those who wrote lengthy, well-considered, very interesting answers that I don't really have the time or ability to fully ENGAGE with. It's all going to be EXTREMELY helpful for the final work - I've just got to get on with it now and start CLEAING!!

posted 19/7/2024 by MJ Hibbett

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