Keeping Count: Archiving Women’s Hockey Analytics for Accessibility

Abstract

Women’s hockey analytics has historically lacked a centralized repository for research, data, and other projects, despite other areas of hockey analytics having such central resources. In this paper, we attempt to fill in this missing piece of women’s hockey analytics by holding an archiving event in which volunteers methodologically gathered as many details on past women’s hockey research and data as possible. Each piece of research and data was then turned into an entry on MetaHockey according to standardized instructions. This event resulted in almost one hundred new women’s hockey focused entries on MetaHockey, whose characteristics largely align with trends in men’s hockey analytics. Examining these entries also empirically reveals an exponentially increase trend in women’s hockey analytics entries year-over-year, demonstrating that both continuing to archive works and taking advantage of this new research in the private and public spheres is conducive to the growth of the field.