There are, of course, some obvious differences between the media of the library wall and a postcard intended for a Postsecret exhibition on campus. Most significantly is the issue of audience. A secret written on a specially-designated Postsecret postcard is meant to be seen as part of the exhibition; a piece of graffiti in the library stacks, at least when I started the project, could only expect to be seen by other students occupying the same study carrel (and not even everyone– I remain amazed at how people can fail to notice details in the world around them, like writing on walls.) The public/private distinction has become less clear over time, as Crescat Graffiti has gained notoriety. I intended the publication of the book in November 2009 to be the culmination and end of this project, fearing that my “going public” with my graffiti-collecting habit might influence potential graffiti-writers. I know it’s had an impact. I’ve found a piece of graffiti written specifically for me (seriously, please, don’t do that, I won’t post it). I also wonder if the recent hijinks of the Advanced Poetry Workshop were in any way inspired by this project (I hope not). I’m still a little surprised every time I’m reminded I have fans, but in a sense it’s only a reminder that what I’m documenting now is in some way different than what I started off documenting.

In any case, this evening’s exhibit featured confessions that were intended to be presented to the public in the context of “art”. The prompt being Postsecret rather than the sorts of things that come to mind when studying, there were significantly fewer complaints about the academic aspects of school. This does not, however, preclude expressions of self-doubt regarding one’s achievement: two people were concerned about their qualification for their upcoming jobs. The question of employment seemed like a significant theme overall, also present in a postcard from an almost-PhD who couldn’t find a part-time summer job worth it. In contrast, employment has never been a major theme in the library graffiti, other than in the iconic “This is for six figures and a hot wife“.

There were postcards about sex, of course, but less by way of penis drawings. Race was a more prevalent theme (liking/disliking particular races, concerns about being perceived as racist, etc.) than in the library; while it’s a more common theme in (men’s) bathrooms, the postcards presented it with less venom. That said, maybe more strongly-worded postcards were censored. Particularly interesting was the portrayal of sexuality. I’ve written about homophobia in the graffiti before, but the postcards in the exhibit were devoid of such sentiments, and instead there were a number of postcards expressing surprise at being attracted to someone of the same sex (despite identifying as straight). Again, one wonders whether some degree of censorship was involved in weeding out the sorts of comments that are relatively common in the stacks.

There was at least one postcard that I’d group with the “meta” graffiti (remarking on a marker fetish), and UofC students’ inclination to directly quote literature and song lyrics– a rather rare tendency, looking across a variety of university library graffiti corpora– also appeared in the postcards, with a quote from The Lion King and a response to Cher’s inquiry about belief in love after love.

The overarching focus on the social life at UofC brought out confessions about not having a best friend, obsessing over one’s future wedding, and hating one’s sorority sisters, in addition to comments about the complexity of love that wouldn’t be so unusual to find in the stacks. My favorite category of graffiti, intellectual commentary, wasn’t well-represented at all, but there were more than a few heartwarming pieces. I’ve posted selected examples from the entire exhibition here.

(6/2/11 addendum: Janel Jin, from the ArtShould Board of Directors, clarified the question of censorship for me: “We received over 200 postcards over the past weeks, and only did not display maybe three or four – these were taken out because they either negatively mentioned another student by their full name, or were simply lacking in content (intentional image/text).” Thanks, Janel!)

• Marx won a competition between him, Smith, and Wendell Berry. What the basis for the votes was is unclear; I assume “general awesomeness”.
• At least one person has been horny in the Reg. Thanks to UChicago Hookups, this can now be appreciated by the world at large, including those unfamiliar with bookstacks.
• UChicago: where knowledge of the names of non-Latin alphabets is a prerequisite for understanding our racism. New t-shirt, anyone?
• The evolution of man: Homo Economics.
• An exploration of metrics for one’s life, including love (courtesy of “Rent”), AIDS (is that response really necessary?), or, just measure your penis.
• Someone mastered chemistry. Someone else remains in the dark.
• Love was secret, and necessary for action.
• A woman announced her pregnancy. In the bathroom. In Arabic.
• I wonder if they’re not teaching cursive in schools these days.
• A discussion of the joys of being young and alive spun off in various directions, including homophobia and an appreciation of Latin.
• “To Delmore Schwartz” was joined by numerous other bits of celebratory, religious, and absurdist verse.

Given the current media frenzy over UChicago Hookups (now eduHookups– they’re going to have a great time with that at Brown), it seems fitting to close this post with a beautiful combination of aspiration and horniness, from the 4th floor women’s bathroom in Cobb, courtesy of Sarah Holzhausen.* “I want to have sex with what I want to become.” Anyone seen a post looking for “my future self, or someone like future me?”

* Yes, I take submissions! E-mail quinn [at] crescatgraffiti [dot] com with photos of university graffiti and where you found it.

Despite the admission office’s recent attempts to make the University of Chicago more welcoming to the well-adjusted and increasingly selective, UChicago is still where fun comes to die. There are students who wouldn’t have it any other way, and others who hate every minute of it. Both groups, at some point or another, end up in the Regenstein Library, where the school motto (Crescat scientia, vita excolatur, ‘May knowledge grow from more to more and so be human life enriched’) is emblazoned near the entrance. The U.S. News & World Report states that the 6-year graduation rate is 91%, and their students’ incoming SAT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 1370-1560.

This project started when I began documenting the graffiti in the stacks of the Regenstein Library in fall 2007. For two years, the only graffiti I cared about was what I found in “the Reg”, and that shaped my expectations about what university graffiti should look like. Unfortunately, I subsequently discovered that the UChicago corpus really is unique, leading to disappointment whenever I’ve sought out graffiti elsewhere. To put it in terms of an “interestingness” score, UChicago’s unweighted score is 1.8, with a weighted score of 1.85. To be fair, this includes data from bathrooms– including the B-level (sub-basement) men’s bathroom, possibly the nerdiest place on earth. None of the other corpora include bathroom data, though I suspect this only helps their score, because bathrooms often drag interestingness scores down. If you exclude the bathrooms, the unweighted score is still 1.74, and the weighted score is 1.79– still .2 higher than the next-highest score, from Brown.

Most interesting categories

This ranking includes the graffiti from the bathrooms. Almost all the B-level men’s bathroom graffiti is a reference; the interestingness score for references, excluding the material from the bathroom, is 2.1

Most common categories

Without the examples from the bathrooms, references make up 5.1% of the corpus.

Quotes and references

When I was only looking at UChicago graffiti, I undervalued graffiti quoting other sources, dismissing them as “typical”. But looking across corpora from different universities, quotes don’t seem to be typical at all– only Brown and UChicago have a high number of quotes; the other three schools rely more heavily on references. Where Brown has about twice as many quotes as references, at UChicago they’re about equal, if you include the B-level men’s bathroom. If you exclude that data, the pattern is more like Brown: about twice as many quotes as references.

The references to “intellectuals” are almost all from the B-level men’s bathroom. There are 20 examples of references to music, broken down into the following genres:

The “other” genres here are R&B, classical, country, hip-hop, reggae, metal, and funk. As for the sources of quotes:

“Scholarship” includes quotes from such works as “Sister Outside: Essays and Speeches” by Audre Lorde, “Science and the Modern World” by Alfred North Whitehead, and Nursing World, vol. 23-24 (1899). The last of these may just be a coincidence; the piece of graffiti in question reads “Nurse, pass the bread.” On the other hand, there might be a really great story behind it. Similar to Brown, about half the quotes are from songs, a total of 76 pieces in the following genres:

Again similar to Brown, rock of various flavors makes up about half the music quotes. At Brown indie is the major sub-category of rock, whereas at UChicago, alternative and punk rock are the largest sub-categories. Beyond that detail, the similarities are striking: rap, pop, punk, and folk are all about equally represented at Brown and UChicago.

Love vs. hate

The UChicago corpus is unique in how many things are hated, and how many things people have mixed feelings about. Like Arizona State, people both love and hate their school, but UChicago students are also conflicted about themselves and “it”. Nine people are loved by name, including Milton Friedman, and “you” appears as the object of love four times. There are fewer sexually-tinged objects of affection than in the Brown corpus, and more references to food. Gen chem is loved but chemistry and biochem are hated. Again conflictingly, both “graffiti” and “when they erase the graffiti” are hated.

Homophobia

I’ve previously written an in-depth examination of homophobia at UChicago, but to provide the most recent data in a form ready for easy comparison with the other corpora, there are 16 pieces of homophobic graffiti (1.1%), when counting each word only once if they’re used multiple times in a single piece. The UChicago corpus uses a greater variety of words than any of the other corpora:

Sexual vs. non-sexual

All in all, UChicago’s sexual word use is fairly middle-of-the-road. In regards to the word “fuck” (with 57 attestations), UChicago uses it more sexually than Brown (14% vs. 9%), but less so than Arizona State (20%) or University of Colorado (24%). For “suck”, UChicago largely aligns with Arizona State with 25% sexual usage– well more than Colorado (12%) and well less than Brown (45%). UChicago, like Brown, has a relatively large number of attestations of “ass” compared to Arizona State and Colorado, but “ass” is only used sexually 27% of the time, compared to Brown’s 53%.

Interestingness by location

Since I had location metadata for the UChicago graffiti, I decided to look at whether any locale had particularly interesting material. The B-level men’s room blew away all the other locations, with an average score of 2.64. Other than that, the other locations (A-level whiteboard, study carrels, walls in the stacks, study desks in the stacks, and other bathrooms) were more or less equal, with the study desks showing slightly lower scores.

Categories over time

One of the most popular metrics in my pseudo-scientific graffiti analysis was the time-based data. In the limited data set I examined, there were some very interesting correlations, where love and despair tended to pattern together, whereas sex reached its one peak in December and declined for the rest of the year. I can’t even recall how exactly I assigned things to “love”, “despair” or “sex” to create that graph, but I re-did it over a longer timespan (fall ’07 – fall ’10, rather than just the 2007-2008 school year), and using the same categorization I used for the rest of the analysis. I didn’t document any graffiti during winter 2009, although there wasn’t much graffiti to document as the walls had recently been painted over.

Sadly, the data is quite scattered, without any clear patterns falling out of it. Category-frequency-over-time analyses, I fear, may be a non-starter.

Interestingness over time / interestingness vs. sample size

Feeling nostalgic for classic pieces of graffiti like “I’m in love and it’s finals week”, I started this analysis convinced that the UChicago graffiti corpus was getting less interesting. However, when I looked at the data, I discovered that it wasn’t the case at all. If anything, the score has been more consistently high over the last school year. Note that the unweighted score is being used here:

One methodological note: there’s 106 pieces of graffiti from the study carrels that were written in either fall 2009 or winter 2010. I took the average of those 106 pieces, and added 53 pieces of graffiti with an average interestingness of 1.58 to the data for each quarter.

Between fall 2007 and fall 2010, the corpus of new graffiti each quarter has fluctuated wildly:

I calculated the Pearson coefficient for interestingness and corpus size, and the result was -.11 — indicating that there is no correlation between the size of the corpus for a given quarter, and how interesting it is. This fact leads me to not be too concerned about differences in sample size between the different university corpora, with the caveat that a minimum threshold (approximately 250 pieces) is met.

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). There’s no single photo set for the UChicago graffiti on Flickr, but anything in the Crescat Graffiti collection that isn’t labeled with the name of another university or library is from the Reg.

In conclusion

I calculated the standard deviation for the quarter-by-quarter interestingness scores at UofC, with a result of 0.105. The overall unweighted score for Brown, at 1.56, is about 2.5 standard deviations below the UofC average. As far as I’ve seen, the graffiti in the Regenstein Library has no peer.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The only Ivy League school I’ve had the chance to explore, Brown University has a library full of wood study desks in the bookstacks, palimpsests of text that has accumulated over many years. In only a few hours there, I amassed 931 pieces of graffiti, 64% of the total amount of graffiti I’ve gathered over the span of three years at UChicago. The U.S. News & World Report* states that their 6-year graduation rate is 95%, and their students’ incoming SAT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 1320-1530.

Going to Brown University revitalized my love for the graffiti project; I had been getting discouraged after looking at one uninspiring graffiti corpus after another. I think a fair cutoff for what I consider to be a “satisfying” graffiti corpus is 1.5, and Brown makes that cut with an unweighted interestingness score of 1.56 and a weighted score of 1.59.

Most interesting categories

Most common categories

Quotes and references

Brown University and UChicago are the only two schools that have a significant number of graffiti quoting sources directly, rather than just making reference to them. At Brown, there’s more than twice as many quotes as references (34 references vs. 72 quotes). There’s enough quotes from music for an exploration of genre to be worthwhile.

The “other” sources include video games, sports, and internet memes.

As usual, music is by far the most common source of quotes, and it can be divided by genre as follows:

Brown students quote music from a wider variety of genres than other schools (over 10 genres quoted, vs. references from 5 genres for Colorado and 4 genres for Arizona State), though this is almost certainly influenced by the larger corpus size. Still, rock (collectively) is more common at Brown than elsewhere: 48%, compared to 23% at Colorado and 33% at Arizona State.

Love vs. hate

There’s a lot of love, and not much hate at Brown. 13 names appear as the objects of affection, and “you” appears six times for love and three times for hate. There’s a wide variety of sexually-tinged objects of affection, from “hot wet pussy” to “hot eunuchs” to “girlfriend’s vagina”. In a corpus this large, it’s remarkable how few things Brown students hate.

Homophobia

There are seven clear examples of homophobia in the Brown corpus, and two ambiguous examples (“VJB likes men” and “Why are there so many homosexuals at Brown?”), the latter of which has the response “Stop homophobia.” 0.76% – 0.97% of the graffiti show homophobia, depending on how you count the ambiguous data. “Fag[got] is used twice as often as “gay”, and the corpus also includes the term “butt-chugger”.

Sexual vs. non-sexual

Given how sexual the Brown graffiti corpus is overall (10% of the graffiti was categorized as “sex”, the most common category), one might expect more sexual use of “fuck”, “suck” and “ass” than in the other corpora. That’s definitely the case for “suck” and “ass”: “suck” is used sexually 45% of the time, vs. 27% at ASU and 12% at the University of Colorado. “Ass” appears twice (vaguely) sexually at ASU and five times non-sexually at University of Colorado, but the 15 examples of “ass” at Brown are split about evenly between sexual and non-sexual uses. Perhaps most interesting, though, is the use of the word “fuck” at Brown. It’s used sexually 20% of the time at ASU, and 24% of the time at the University of Colorado, but less than 10% of the time at Brown.

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). You can also browse the photo set on Flickr.

Next up

To finish out the year, the last part of the analysis will focus on the University of Chicago, where this whole project began. In addition to the usual metrics, the UChicago analysis includes a second-look at the time-based analysis that was part of the original pseudo-scientific analysis.

* I hate the US News & World Report rankings, particularly the way the admissions office at UChicago has been eager to bend over backwards to improve their score, to the detriment of the school’s unique “personality”. But in case you’re curious, Brown University is ranked at #15.

The University of California at Berkeley was my first stop when I expanded my study of graffiti to other universities. After the University of Chicago’s graffiti, I was struck by the violence, discussions of identity, and vaginas I found there.

According to the US News & World Report*, their 6-year graduation rate is 90% and their students’ incoming SAT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 950-1210.

There’s only 143 pieces of graffiti in the Berkeley corpus, and this is problematic. A couple discussions on a given topic can skew the “most common categories”. If there’s only a couple pieces of graffiti in a given category, and they have a high score, it skews the “most interesting categories”. There’s only three quotes and four references, so looking at their source or music genre isn’t very informative.

The unweighted interestingness score for Berkeley is 1.43, and the weighted score is 1.47. In spite of the corpus size issues, the interestingness score might be one of the more valid results. I’ve looked at the interestingness score for the UChicago graffiti corpus quarter-by-quarter, and the score doesn’t vary much between quarters, even when the sample size for that particular quarter is the same size as the Berkeley corpus or smaller.

Most interesting categories

The “most interesting categories” data is skewed by the size of the corpus. I’ve included the number of pieces in each category; the top two categories are most affected by the small corpus.

Most common categories

Berkeley students apparently have a lot of advice to share.

Quotes and references

There’s only three quotes (from a pop song, a rock song, and the Bible) and four references (to a punk song, a gang, and two references to sports).

Love vs. hate

There are four things that are loved, and one thing that is hated in the Berkeley corpus; it’s so small that I don’t think it can be trusted to be representative. But, for whatever little it’s worth…

Homophobia

There are three homophobic pieces of graffiti in the Berkeley corpus (2% of the total graffiti). All of them are variations on fag[got]: “fag”, “Asians are fags”, and “cheat more faggot”.

Sexual vs. non-sexual

Once again, the corpus size causes problems. There are three instances of “fuck” — two of them are non-sexual, one of them (“fuck girls”) is ambiguous. There are two examples of “suck”, both non-sexual. There are no examples of “ass”.

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). You can also browse the photo set on Flickr.

Next up

Part 4 in the series of graffiti analysis results is Brown University. Corpus size isn’t a problem there– in only a couple hours at Brown University’s Rockefeller Library, I amassed 931 pieces of graffiti, 64% of the amount of graffiti I’ve gathered over the span of three years at UChicago.

* I hate the US News & World Report rankings, particularly the way the admissions office at UChicago has been eager to bend over backwards to improve their score, to the detriment of the school’s unique “personality”. But in case you’re curious, University of California at Berkeley is ranked at #22.

An endearing hippie-town in the mountains with outstanding microbreweries, Boulder is home to the University of Colorado – Boulder. The U.S. News & World Report* states that their 6-year graduation rate is 67.0%, and their students’ incoming ACT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 24-29 (roughly equivalent to 1110-1300 on the SAT).

Unlike the other corpora I’ve looked at for this analysis, this is the first time I’ve written about the University of Colorado on the blog. The trip to their library was neither overwhelmingly inspiring, nor overwhelmingly bad, and that’s reflected in their interestingness score: 1.38 unweighted, and 1.41 weighted.

Most interesting categories

Like with the Arizona State graffiti, it’s worth noting that reference and quotes are the easiest categories for getting higher scores: quoting/referencing song lyrics gets you a 1, TV/movies/pop lit gets you a 2, and literature/theater gets you a 3. Greek is also easy to score high in: just say something about the frat will get you a 2 or 3, whereas just writing its name will get you a 1.

Most common categories

Quotes and references

Quoting sources directly, instead of only making references to them, is a trend found in the corpora from UChicago and Brown. The University of Colorado has about twice as many references as quotes (26 vs. 14), but the disparity is significantly less than at ASU, where it was an 8-to-1 ratio.

As expected, music is the biggest source of references. The genres are broken down as follows:

The distribution of sources for quotes is similar:

The “intellectuals” quoted at the University of Colorado are Heinrich Kaminski and Nietzsche, in case you’re curious. There are only four quotes from songs– three of them rock songs, one of them Latin.

Love vs. hate

There are six stated objects of love, and four statements of hate in the University of Colorado corpus. (There’s three additional objects of love– “hippies”, “sluts” and “douchebags”, but the context is obviously sarcastic.) Unlike at Arizona State, Colorado has a couple statements about love and hate: “If all of you turned your hate into passion to LOVE, Boulder would be a better place…” and “Hate no one and nothing “.

Homophobia

8 pieces of graffiti at the University of Colorado (3% of the total) make negative use of “gay” or “fag[g]ot”. (Yes, someone misspelled it.) While the percent of homophobic graffiti isn’t much less than Arizona State’s 4.2%, “gay” is used much more frequently in the University of Colorado corpus:

Sexual vs. non-sexual

The final metric I looked at was sexual vs. non-sexual use of words that could have either reading. Out of 25 examples of “fuck”, 19 were non-sexual. There were 8 examples of “suck”, with 7 of them non-sexual. Interestingly, three of the non-sexual examples take the usually sexual form “suck dick” (“Obama sucks dick”, “Lakers suck dick”, “UTAH Jazz suck 10 million dicks”), but it’s being used for emphasis rather than as a reference to oral sex. All five examples of “ass” are non-sexual.

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). You can also browse the photo set on Flickr.

Next up

Part 3 in the series of graffiti analysis results is the University of California at Berkeley. There’s a problem with the results: I’m skeptical about the validity of some of them, because I suspect the sample size is too small. I’ve done the work, though, so I’ll present the results… with a lot of disclaimers and warnings.

* I hate the US News & World Report rankings, particularly the way the admissions office at UChicago has been eager to bend over backwards to improve their score, to the detriment of the school’s unique “personality”. But in case you’re curious, University of Colorado – Boulder is ranked at #86.

Located in a college town that seems to have neither a coffee house nor a bookstore (and I don’t mean stores that sell textbooks along with school paraphernalia), Arizona State University is a rather bizarre place. The U.S. News & World Report* states their 6-year graduation rate is 56%, and their students’ incoming SAT scores, 25th-75th percentile, are 950 – 1210.

My visit to their library last summer was the most depressing graffiti trip I’ve made.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Arizona State didn’t fare too well on interestingness, with an unweighted score of 1.23 and a weighted score of 1.25.

Most interesting categories

It’s worth noting that reference and quotes are the easiest categories for getting higher scores: quoting/referencing song lyrics gets you a 1, TV/movies/pop lit gets you a 2, and literature/theater gets you a 3.

Most common categories

Quotes and references

Based on my long-term exposure to the University of Chicago graffiti corpus, I went into the analysis looking down on the practice of quoting sources directly, given how common it is at UChicago. Remarkably, when looking across all five corpora, it seems that quoting sources is a phenomenon found mostly at the better schools (UChicago and Brown), whereas making references– without quoting– is more common at less good schools. Arizona State is the clearest example: there are over 8 references for every quote. At UChicago, the numbers are about equal; at Brown, there’s about 2 quotes for every reference.

Given how few quotes there are at ASU (a grand total of 5, and only 2 are song lyrics), looking at music genres is uninteresting. For the record, both quotes are from rap songs. The 41 references point to a variety of sources:

Here’s the genre breakdown for the 9 references to bands and/or songs:

Love vs. hate

There is far more love (25 pieces) than hate (3 pieces) at Arizona State, with names referenced as objects of affection 10 times, and school mentioned twice for love, and once for hate.

Homophobia

Arizona State has the most homophobic corpus, with 4.2% of the graffiti (22 pieces) making some reference to “gay” or “fag[got]“, not in a positive light. Both words are used equally often:

/p>

Sexual vs. non-sexual

The final metric I looked at was sexual vs. non-sexual use of words that could have either reading, e.g. “fuck me” (sexual) vs. “fuck finals” (non-sexual); “suck my cock” vs. “this sucks”; “fuck me in the ass” vs. “what an asshole”. Out of 25 examples of “fuck”, and 11 examples of “suck”, non-sexual uses were more common. There were only two examples of “ass” (“fat ass” and “hot asses”).

See for yourself

The spreadsheets I used to compile the data are available as a Google Doc. If you want to download the data for yourself, just go to File > Download and choose your favorite format. If you do something interesting with the data, I’d love to hear about it (quinn – at – crescatgraffiti – dot – com). You can also browse the photo set on Flickr.

Next up

Part 2 in the series of graffiti analysis results is University of Colorado — Boulder. It’s a significant step up from Arizona State.

* I hate the US News & World Report rankings, particularly the way the admissions office at UChicago has been eager to bend over backwards to improve their score, to the detriment of the school’s unique “personality”. But in case you’re curious, ASU is ranked at #143.

As usual, the results of a serious analysis are less clear-cut, and less flashy. That said, I think the results might be legitimately insightful this time. With the goal of being as transparent as possible about how I came to my conclusions, here’s how I went about the task:

The data

I chose the five schools where I had the biggest transcribed graffiti corpora. This included UChicago (1455 pieces of graffiti), Brown (930), Berkeley (142), University of Colorado – Boulder (262), and Arizona State University (507). I have an enormous corpus from McGill, but I haven’t transcribed any of it and that part takes to long for me to have it ready in time. It is also Canadian, an Anglophone school in an otherwise Francophone environment, and culturally set apart from my other schools. I have a large untranscribed corpus from University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, but when I was taking pictures there, I was only looking for interesting graffiti, which would throw off all my metrics.

My original transcriptions were based on the unit of the photograph, and often combined multiple pieces of graffiti in different hands in a single spreadsheet cell. For this analysis, I broke the pieces apart, linking connected pieces with an identifying number and a unique letter that indicated its known (in the case of the UChicago graffiti) or hypothesized place in the conversation (e.g. AS-20B is the presumed second piece of graffiti in a conversation numbered 20 at Arizona State; the numbers are based on the conversation’s position in the original transcription, and don’t actually mean anything.)

I only counted the graffiti in English– I didn’t want to privilege languages I could read/easily get translations for.

Almost all of the graffiti is from public study areas in the main library of the university. The exception is the graffiti from the Regenstein men’s bathrooms at UChicago. After a long debate with my husband (him pro, me anti) I decided to include them, even though I didn’t check out the men’s bathrooms at the other schools. For the sake of full disclosure, including them did raise UofC’s overall interestingness by more than .1 (which, as you’ll see with the results, is a non-trivial amount.)

The methodology

There were multiple things I looked at, including sources quoted and referenced, sexual use of words, and things loved and hated, but the main focus of the analysis was the topics discussed in graffiti and overall interestingness. Each piece of graffiti was classified and ranked for interestingness within one or more of the following 22 categories:

• Advice
• Classes
• [Intellectual] Commentary
• Despair
• Drugs
• Greek [fraternity]
• Insults
• Love
• Meta [about graffiti, the surface it's written on, etc]
• Misc
• Orthography [spelling and/or grammar corrections]
• Politics
• Presence [variations on "X was here"]
• Quotes [quoting things directly from other sources]
• Reference [making reference to another source]
• Religion
• Reply
• School
• Self
• Sex
• Social [social issues]
• Time

“Interestingness” sounds subjective, and while there’s plenty of room to nitpick on individual pieces, I’ve found that people tend to largely agree with the assessment I’ve made. (Perhaps it would’ve been better to make up an abbreviation, like GIR — Graffiti Interestingness Ranking– because nobody argues with a number associated with an abbreviation. But I’m trying to be transparent here.)

In general, I used the following guidelines for rankings:

• 1: there are one or more words written, but there’s not much more you can say for it. It may a single, disconnected word without any context. It may be an obvious reply (“me too”), it may be someone’s initials, it may be a simple declaration of love (“I love X”).
• 2: there’s a little more substance there– a complete thought, a non-obvious reply, use of non-obvious phrasing (“Physics wants me dead” rather than “I hate physics”).
• 3: the piece has some real substance or a spark to it– wordplay, a complete thought that really says something or elicits a response from the reader.

There were ten pieces in the UChicago corpus that received a 4 in their categories– a mark of distinction, something truly clever or memorable, a step above the 3′s.

The ranking worked slightly differently for a couple of categories:

• Quotes and References: the ranking was based on the source referenced or quoted, where songs or bands received a 1, TV/movies/pop literature received a 2, and literature/plays received a 3
• Greek: frat letters alone (the most common manifestation) got a 1, saying something about the frat got a 2

Working with the idea that rare genres are interesting, I looked at how frequently each genre occurs in each corpus. To do this, some of the pieces of graffiti were double-counted (e.g. a single piece of graffiti could be both “Reply” and “Greek”). For calculating the final interestingness score for each corpus, I eliminated duplicate entries for pieces of graffiti. I chose their final classification based on whatever would give them the highest interestingness score, or if the scores were equal, using the less common classification.

I decided to give a .5 bonus to scores in the genres that occur with <2% frequency across all five corpora, as a way to mark the interestingness of rare genres. Intellectual Commentary (1.5%), Drugs (1.32%), Orthography (.53%), Politics (1.53%), School (1.94%), Self (1.58%), Social (1.85%), and Time (1.2%) occur less in less than <2% of graffiti each, but I threw out Drugs and Politics after reviewing the individual pieces of graffiti and concluding they were not actually interesting. It's great to base decisions off of numbers when you can, but even though I can't in this case, I feel no regret in not providing an interestingness bonus to things like "Smoke that KUSH" or "Bush knocked down the towers".

You could argue that my choice of categories influences the scores, and you wouldn't be wrong. That said, I think all the categories are valid on the basis of the UChicago data, and all but one occur in at least 3 of the 5 corpora. The exception is Time, which I only have data for from Brown and UChicago. Still, there are 9 examples from Brown (more than Intellectual Commentary, or Orthography, or Greek), so maybe it's just a concern for the higher-ranked schools.

The addition of the bonus .5 point did raise scores overall, but didn't result in any changes to the schools' rankings relative to each other.

Sampling

One of the questions people should ask about is the effect of sampling. The data from UChicago was collected over more than three years, whereas the data from the other schools was collected on a single visit, at different times of year: February for Berkeley, June for Brown and Arizona State, and July for University of Colorado. What about the effect of wall cleaning? How can I assert that the graffiti that happened to be there on that particular day is representative?

The answer: I can’t be certain, but I do have an interesting bit of data from a time-based study of UChicago graffiti. Convinced that the graffiti here is getting less interesting over time, I calculated the interestingness score for every quarter that I’ve been working on this project, and it didn’t vary by more than maybe .15– details coming in the post on UChicago.

That said, when the results from Berkeley (check back the week of 12/17) came in, they seemed to be skewed by the contents of a single, extended conversation, leading me to think that 142 isn’t a big enough corpus for the results to be entirely valid. I didn’t have that problem with the University of Colorado data, so maybe 250 would be a better cut-off in the future.

Next up: Arizona State

I’m publishing the data from least interesting to most interesting, to end the year on a good note. For a preview of the upcoming horror that is the graffiti at the Arizona State University library, check out the blog post from earlier this year.

12/4/10: Addendum on quotes and genres

As I’ve been doing the write-ups for each corpus, I realized I didn’t describe my method for identifying quotes, or the genres of the music referenced or quoted. I Googled every piece of graffiti that went beyond a simple, predictable statement– there were definitely some things that I thought were just creative that ended up being song lyrics. I marked every quote or reference with a classification (“music”, “TV”, “literature”, etc.) and then went back to identify the name of the source work and the author/artist (if relevant). For music reference/quote genres, I used the information provided by Wikipedia.

* To the extent that there was a negative response, it was almost always along the lines of “Why would anyone waste their time doing an analysis of graffiti?”, to which I’d be inclined to answer that it’s a fascinating look into the lives of college students, and I’ve found that inquiry into the small, everyday things that often get overlooked is a more fulfilling use of time than watching TV, playing computer games, or posting trollish comments on-line.

Perhaps “plagiarism” is unnecessarily accusatory. Many of the pieces pull from popular culture, a frame of reference ideally shared by writer and reader, such that the reader would likely recognize the source without written attribution, rather than assume that the source of the quote was the writer. That said, I’ve been fooled before by quotes that seemed profound until I Googled them, and there was one example from Brown where a reader expressed interest in marrying the writer of a piece of graffiti, perhaps not realizing the author was W.H. Auden.

A cursory glance at the other data sets shows that music is the most common source of quotes. I’d guess that at Brown, music is referred to less often than average. With only one data point, it’s hard to determine what does (or doesn’t) make the genre results interesting, but I was surprised to see the strong showing by indie rock, as well as the fact that the three varieties of rock music together make up almost half of the data. Meanwhile, rap and R&B only make up 22% of the data– much lower than I expected.

Another preview: the preliminary average “interestingness” score (out of 3, before I implement category-based weighting) for the Brown graffiti is 1.56. The “Quotes” category described above makes up 14% of the pieces of graffiti that fall in a specific category (i.e. excluding the generic “misc” and “reply” categories). The most common category at Brown? Sex, at 20%.

Most notable is the wall of poetry, where “To Delmore Schwartz” by Robert Lowell has been joined by an anonymous quote:
Rejoice! O Man For your achievements
are great
and number as the stars (read both full size)
and then subsequently, by Jabberwocky in its entirety.

While one student recommends appreciating the joy of being YOUNG and ALIVE, another laments the temporary nature of graffiti, and a third dismisses the entire conversation with “Quit being gay, study!”. (See full size.) Meanwhile, someone else is just kidding.

In the 5th floor women’s bathroom, I discovered “I’m pregnant” in Arabic, translated by Lauren Osborne who wonders if the writer just took a pregnancy test, and the wall was the first “person” she told. I’ve also discovered that Barbie studies in Crerar science library. There’s some elaborate gremlin heads in the Reg study carrels, not far from some ruthless copyediting of another student’s “hip” graffiti (see full size).

Perhaps my favorite so far from this fall is a serious response to what was probably just a whiny Why is Latin so hard?: “b/c they don’t print it with diacritical marks. (it really would be much easier if they did”. Lamenting the absence of macrons in Latin texts not written for learners: I’ve never seen the likes of it elsewhere.

Speaking of the uniqueness of UChicago graffiti, I’m putting together another “analysis” of my enormous corpus of graffiti data, now including material from a variety of universities. Ever since I started examining graffiti from outside the University of Chicago, I’ve had the sense that there’s something unique about the graffiti we have here, but I’ve never tried to quantify it. So now I’m going through each piece of graffiti from each university, classifying it (and weighting certain classes differently depending on their frequency across the entire corpus– orthographic corrections and intellectual commentary count for more than sex or complaining about classes), and assigning a score of 1-3 (1 is for a single word or expected phrase, 2 is for a more fleshed-out thought, 3 is for something with a twist– be it insight, wordplay, or something that makes it memorable). The plan is then to divide the total score by the number of pieces of graffiti, to determine the “interestingness” of each university’s graffiti corpus. One could argue that my metric privileges the UChicago graffiti, but I really am trying to be objective, and I’d like to hope that we can all agree that there really is something more interesting about “Holbach your marks, you’re going to ruin the Staël” than “Fuck you”.

Tangentially (and without having any sense of what the outcome will look like), I’m also working on determining the source of the various music, movie, TV and literature quotes found in the graffiti corpus, to see the differences in genre and media distribution on different campuses.

I’m hoping to have both done by the end of this month, so stay tuned.