Data. I got your data right here, babee.
Yesterday, I posted a little bit of analysis of peerages bestowed in the Outlands over time with some pretty graphs. It had some interesting trends, but peerages aren't the entirety of the awards structure, so I went ahead and did the same kind of basic analysis with the grant-level orders.
The first one is straight-up raw numbers of Outlandish GoA-level orders bestowed per year since the creation of the Big Three Grant-level orders in 1995.
Note: None of this data includes plain Grants of Arms - the Wimble DB doesn't track the giving kingdom for plain Grants the way it does for Patent-level Orders, making it basically impossible to extract only the Grants which were given by the Outlands.
Note: The White Scarf used to be an AoA-level award. At some point, it split into two - DWS1 which was AoA-level (historical) and DWS2 which was GoA-level. In Jaxx and Kathryn's reign, they merged them both together again, as all GoA-level, including retroactively giving all pre-DWS2 members Grants dating to their original induction. I Have An Opinion About That, but in any case ... the point is that I didn't have anyone handy who could tell me when the DWS2 started, so I chose to start counting it in 1995, the same time as the Big Three GoA orders. This is a totally arbitrary decision on my part - I'm just a bit too impatient to wait for folks to come back from Enduro. ;)
Note: The Silver Lance, the equestrian order, simply does not have enough data points to get a line - it shows up only as the data points in both graphs. There were 2 given in 2004 and 1 given in 2010 (and there's still a member who is also a member of another GoA-level order!).
The black line shows the average number of Grant-level Orders given for that year. Note that 2011 is less than half-way over (at least, as far as court reports in the database go) - there hasn't necessarily been a huge dropoff in awards.
It's a bit jaggedy and hard to follow, in part because it's raw data and in part because the numbers are so small. So, to smooth things out, I made a set with weighted averages.
This is a weighted average that takes into account the previous two years and the following two years (10%*X-2 + 20%*X-1 + 40%*X + 20%*X+1 + 10%*X+2). The first two and last two years of this chart are a bit less reliable, since they're missing data to weight against (they're somewhat adjusted to compensate). Again, the black "average" line is a plain average of the other points for the year in question (it's not re-weighted or anything).
What's interesting to me:
- The numbers of Grant-level awards is declining in all categories, just like the peerages.
- This data matches the East Kingdom's Peerage distribution in that the non-martial arts are recognized more frequently than the martial ones.
- There was a big bubble for Service, and a lesser one in the early-mid 2000s for Heavy and Light. That's not reflected in the average, because of the long decline of Arts & Sciences, which has recently started to turn around.
- Overall, The Big Award has been the Stag, followed by the Flower. It shouldn't be too surprising to note that Flower-Stag is the most common 2-Grant combination (which it was the last time I ran that data, a few years ago).
Note: All the data used to compile these charts is publicly available on the Wimble website; thus these charts are also public information - anyone could have made them. (It just would've taken them rather longer to compile.)