The Worksite Newsletter About Being a Hugo Finalist That I Can't Link You

So when I learned I was a Hugo finalist for Best Related Work, and they (the Hugo management folks) were giving us a pep talk about leveraging our status for publicity, it occurred to me that Bayer's  "human interest" feature in the site newsletter would be perfect for talking about how the "cliff" analysis was in many ways similar to my work on discrepancy investigations. So I pitched it to our communications person, and he linked me with their publicity person who interviewed me about it, and yesterday (you remember yesterday? my last day at work?) they finally got me a proof to approve and then got it up on the website.

Only this is the behind-the-firewall intranet site that only employees can read. Makes it hard to brag about.

But anyway, here's what the article says:

From Discrepancy Investigation to Science-Fiction Award Finalist

When controversy swirled around unusual voting results in the 2023 Hugo Awards, the preeminent annual award program for science fiction and fantasy literature, people throughout the fandom
clamored for answers. That included Heather Rose Jones, a long-time conformance investigator at Bayer Berkeley.

[Picture of me sitting at my home desk pretending to write something.]

Picture caption: Heather Rose Jones is a just-retired discrepancy investigator for Bayer in Berkeley. Outside of work, she writes queer fantasy and historical fiction, including the Regency-era Alpennia series and the fairy-tale novella The Language of Roses, as well as multiple short stories. She has non-fiction publications on topics ranging from biotech to historic costume to naming practices and has a PhD in Linguistics. Heather creates the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog and podcast, presenting research on sapphic themes in history as a resource for authors writing historic-based fiction.

Jones, who worked at Bayer from 2003 until her retirement on April 30, also is a science fiction writer with a keen interest in the Hugo Awards results. She turned the investigative skills she honed studying manufacturing issues into a detailed analysis of the complex crowdsourced nominating process.

“What I wanted to do when I started my analysis was say, ‘Let’s define exactly what’s happening,’” she said. “‘Let’s see which categories it’s happening in. Let’s see which nominees it privileges and which ones it did not and try to get a sense of what went wrong.’”

It was the same approach Jones used every day in her work as a discrepancy investigator at Bayer.

“When something goes wrong, we’re the ones who try to figure out what happened, why and how to fix it,” she said. “When I see interesting data patterns, my immediate reaction is to gather all the data we have and start slicing and dicing it from different directions.”

She wrote a few blog posts with her analysis, which indicated the results were, in fact, tampered with. Soon, another blogger who was working on his own deep dive into the data asked her to collaborate on an essay, Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics.

In an interesting turn of events, that essay has itself been named a Hugo Award finalist. Voting is going on now, and the organization will announce the winners in August. Charting the Cliff is one of six finalists in the best related works category.

And now that she’s retired from Bayer, Jones will have even more time for her writing. She writes lesbian historical fiction and has a blog and podcast focused on researching lesbian history for others who write in the genre. Her next project is to turn her podcast material into a nonfiction book.