Eidolon’s 2016, By the Numbers

2016 is nearly over, for which I know many are profoundly grateful. Nevertheless, it was a good year for Eidolon. The journal grew from three to four editors, added an editorial board, and published over 100 articles.

In the tradition of last December’s editorial, I’ve compiled some end-of-year statistics on Eidolon’s traffic, author demographics, and content — including a few surprises.

Traffic

• 109 pieces of content were published on Eidolon this year.
• Eidolon received over 250,000 hits this year, a 67% increase from last year.
• The year’s top five most-read articles produced 30% of the year’s total traffic. Those articles were:

• Medium tracks a statistic that they call a “read ratio,” the percentage of readers who actually finish an article. To my knowledge, I’m the only person who cares about read ratios; everyone else seems to care much more about views. But in case someone out there is curious, the three articles from this year with the highest read ratios are:

Authors

• Eidolon published articles by 69 authors. 10 of those authors wrote more than one article this year.
• 46 of the 69 authors have PhDs; 19 of those are tenured faculty members.
• Untenured PhDs wrote more than half of Eidolon’s articles this year.
• 37 of Eidolon’s 2016 authors were male; 32 were female. The gender ratio is nearly identical to that of Eidolon’s 2015 writers (54.7% male in 2015 to 53.6% male in 2016).
• However, 8 of the 10 repeat authors in 2016 were female, and overall much more of the content this year was written by women (68 articles vs. 40 articles; one article was written jointly by a man and a woman). Female-authored articles also received proportionally more traffic than male-authored articles.

Content

• In addition to our usual personal essays and comparisons between the ancient and modern world, Eidolon diversified its content this year to introduce many more articles about pedagogy and the discipline of Classics.
• We introduced two new columns — ‘Disciplinary Action’ by Johanna Hanink, addressing the politics of the Classics field, and ‘Boundary Hunter’ by Andrew Tobolowsky, exploring the boundaries between spaces, genres, and ideas — and a new comic strip, Semper Ubi.
• 10 of the year’s articles had topics relating to the 2016 election cycle.
• 15 articles had original art.

In December, Eidolon published eight articles. Five of those (marked with asterisks) were published as a special “issue” of the journal about childbirth in the ancient and modern world.

Elizabeth Butterworth introduced a new Paideia Institute program to teach literacy through Latin to elementary and middle school children in Aequora
Andrew Tobolowsky continued his ‘Boundary Hunter’ column with humorous rewritings of ancient myths in Zeus and Friends
*Sarah Scullin explored the objectification of the pregnant body in the ancient world and today in “She’s Only a 4”
*I meditated on how being a mother changed how I read Euripides’ Medea in Medea’s Postpartum Obsession
*Tara Mulder shared her own experiences as a midwife’s assistant and how they color her interpretation of Soranus in Midwifery, Then and Now
Eidolon’s first ever comic strip, Semper Ubi, featured a comic by Lucy Bell Jarka-Sellers
*Yurie Hong compared anxieties over who gets to control reproduction in Hesiod’s Theogony and debates over the CRISPR gene-editing technology in Playing Zeus
*Anna Bonnell-Freidin argued that the policing of pregnant women’s behavior in order to produce the “best” infants has ancient roots in Well-Born

Thank you, as always, for reading — and here’s to a happy 2017!

Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Paideia Institute. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.