EK Peerages, a slight analysis

[fosveny]

Apparently due to a conversation on the EK general discussion list (which I am not on), scaharp posted some counts of elevations-per-half-decade in the East kingdom for each of the peerages. I grok graphs and stats some, and I wanted to break it down by years.

This is pretty much a copy-and-paste from a comment I made in her livejournal:

Comments

[fosveny]

No, but it would be simple. Do you want just the total # ever elevated by the East, or a running, year-by-year total?

[fosveny]

The East has made: 254 pelicans, 294 laurels, and 177 chivalry.

[ursule]

For comparison, since becoming a kingdom An Tir has made 201 pelicans, 197 laurels, and 143 knights. (I'm giving you the numbers for An Tir rather than Caid because they're easy to pull up from the An Tir OP at http://op.antirheralds.org/index.php .)

[dr_zrfq]

It would also be interesting to do weighted average of peerages made as a percentage of kingdom population. (Or at least as close an estimate of the latter as possible.)

[fosveny]

If you can get me historical East Kingdom membership numbers on a per-year basis, I'd be happy to do the analysis.

[dr_zrfq]

Chronicler's office perhaps? The closest to actual counts that I can think of is Pikestaff deliveries to ZIP codes within the then-current kingdom boundaries.

Anyone know who might have historical delivery data by ZIP code? I'd be happy to crunch those numbers to come up with the rough-estimate population figures. (Whatever the ratio of subscribing members to total members may be, a number of folks whose experience I greatly respect have posited that the ratio doesn't change much over time, thus subscribers in kingdom can be used to estimate total population by mutiplying by F, this measurement's "fudge factor" constant.)

[etfb]

Could do some interesting stuff with the data from Canon Lore, the awards database of the kingdom of Lochac. Let me know if you want a dump in some suitable format...

[herveus]

I tallied the data for Atlantia, noting only peers made by Atlantia. I've got Chiv/Laurel/Pel by year. The left hand set is the raw data; the right hand set is
the five-year weighted average as above. Chivalry shows a slow downward trend; Laurel and Pelican surged in the late 1990s and have only declined a bit from that.

Year Chivalry Laurel Pelican Total Chivalry Laurel Pelican Total

[dr_zrfq]

It now occurs to me that going strictly by calendar year is less useful than it could be. Perhaps we can do data from one Spring Coronation to the next? Then each tabulation period would cover 2 reigns (3 in the West). (Going by single reigns causes weirdness in kingdoms that, like Atlantia until recently, had very different reign lengths between the "first" reign of a year and its successor.)

[fosveny]

A year is a nice, easy to determine, constant time period. The spikes caused by reigns which are not a year long and starting on jan 1.

The smoothing/averages should take care of any weirdness that's going on. Like the year-of-23-laurels in the East.

[mariedeblois]

It's possible, sure, but a lot more tricky. Since the Coronation dates vary, you'd pretty much be looking at a totally manual process. Also, placing anyone who was elevated to the peerage -at- Coronation becomes a sticky wicket.

[bend_gules]

Um...no mathematician here, but...
Surely it's relevant that AEthelmearc left the EK in 1997 or so? I know this only because it was shortly before Ealdormere went kingdom.

It could have a strong effect on the change around that time: eligible potential peers are now in a new kingdom w/ a smaller pool of relevant peers to convince.

Not certain what to make of the effect on the Laurels - maybe there was a race to make some people peers in the EK before the AEthelmearc split?

Less relevant is that Drachenwald left in 1993 - fewer people to discuss, most of them unknown to the bulk of the EK peers.

The other interesting point would be trends in repeat Crowns - perhaps some crowns are quicker to advance people they've seen before than others (or conversely hold over old wounds).

[bunnyjadwiga]

I think if you were to chart all the polling orders from 73 onward, you might be able to pinpoint the endpoints of certain regional trends by troughs. The East in particular has gone through at least 2 eras of 'all the kings come from around x', and in the two eras I know of, there was a falling-off of orders and AoAs at the end of the era, followed by a huge upsurge when the changeover occurred.

There may be an age-related issue with the three peerages, as someone pointed out. We would expect to see more Pelicans being made as the SCA grays, since the Pelican is more of a lifetime achievement award; the laurel, not so much, but still requires a big body of work. The Chivalry, however, depends on a *physical* qualification that-- if everything people say about combat and combat sports is true-- is harder to achieve as you age (I don't know nothin' about no fightin'.)