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.

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:

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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.

In just three hours combing through the study areas in the Rock stacks, I collected over 500 pieces of graffiti– a number that took me about six months in the corresponding areas of the Reg. What’s the difference? Even though the Rock and the Reg have similar setups, (wood study desks and adjacent white walls) students at Brown tend to write on the desks, where at UChicago the majority of the graffiti appears on the walls, which are much easier to clean periodically. The result: desk-as-palimpsest, with some graffiti in areas of the desk that are less likely to be worn down by other people’s books and papers apparently persisting for 15+ years.

This is the first time I’ve been able to collect such a sizable corpus at any university besides UChicago, and Brown being an Ivy League school makes for a fairer comparison² than, say, UChicago vs. Arizona State. If you want to explore the corpus yourself, here’s the photo set³ and the transcription of the English graffiti.

The spaces

There a lot more desks at Brown than UChicago– on most floors, they’re lined up in rows. Like at Berkeley and Mount Holyoke, it appears that at least some of the desks are reserved for individuals. Unlike Mount Holyoke, few of the desks are decorated, and I found only one note threatening anyone who might encroach on the space. (Don’t mess with Masumi’s desk. She’ll eat you.)

Similarities?

As I was walking through the library, madly snapping pictures (I maxed out my 4 GB memory card in the first hour and a half), a number of whimsical gems stuck in my mind. Recent UChicago graffiti additions haven’t been doing much for me lately; when I think of the corpus, the banal leaps to mind first. The novelty of the Brown graffiti made it seem fascinating and profound by comparison. The discovery of a hieroglyphic play on words seemed like a particularly striking similarity to the UChicago corpus.

But looking at word frequencies across a transcribed data set provides a more dispassionate view onto the data. Upon greater reflection, it seems like there are more differences than similarities between the sets of graffiti. The picture that emerges is of UChicago as a school of (at times gleefully) unhappy, critical students eager to one-up each other in intellectual (or less-intellectual) debates, whereas Brown leads more towards the hedonistic and happier, expressing their sexuality.

Perhaps the one thing students at both schools share is a dislike of organic chemistry.

Organic chemistry

In the Reg, students languish under the cruel hand of “o-chem“. In the Rock, it’s “orgo” that strikes fear into the hearts of students. And, as at UChicago, there’s always some masochist who enjoys it.

Insecurity

Despair is a theme so common in UChicago graffiti that it has its own photo set with over 70 photos. Students worry they aren’t smart enough, and are drowning and doomed. In the Brown graffiti corpus, one student wondered why they were accepted to Brown, and another student needs to be smarter, though those are the only examples of such sentiments.

At Brown, students seem pretty happy with the school; someone even wrote it a goodbye note. There’s no meme of “be happy” (suggesting happiness is an unrealized state) like at UChicago, and while there was one conversation about depression, it was by no means a pervasive topic.

Given that smiley and frowny faces often serve as a form of punctuation rather than being a meaningful indicator of overall state of being, I hesitate to bring it up in this context. For what little it may be worth, though, where UChicago has almost a 2:1 ratio of smiley to frowny faces, the ratio is 5:1 at Brown.

Homophobia

I’ve written about anti-LGBTQ graffiti at UChicago before, and Brown provides an interesting point of comparison and contrast. There are 8 examples in the public Brown study areas, compared to 12 in the corresponding spaces at UChicago; that’s about even, since the UChicago corpus has about twice as many words.

At UChicago, there’s greater variety in the words used (fag, flamer, gay, homo, homosexual, lesbo); at Brown, there’s only “gay”, “fag[got]” and “homosexual”. There’s one use of “lesbian” Furthermore, while “fag” was used less than “gay” at UChicago, it outnumbers “gay” in the Brown corpus.

Brown and UChicago sport nearly identical pieces of graffiti, where anti-LGBTQ language is used as a counter-response to someone responding to the word “retarded”; at UChicago, it’s “gay“; at Brown, it’s “faggot“. At Brown, Backgammon is for fags only, a “good fag suck” finds its way into some bad collective poetry, and “faggot” is used as a generic insult.

However, three of the eight pieces were subsequently censured by other students. “Why are there so many homosexuals at brown? is followed up by “Stop homophobia”. “Butt-chugger – GAY” has the incredulous reply “Really? In here!?”. And “NO GAYS” is rejected by a number of individuals: “U R Sick”, “no hatred”, “No ignorance”.

There’s a couple other pieces of graffiti at Brown that refer to LGBTQ individuals differently from those pieces mentioned above. A response to one piece about “hot chicks” asks “Are you lesbian?” without any apparent pejorative implication. A follow-up to a piece of graffiti about the directionality of penis bending states “Queers Bash Back“; if there was any initial anti-LGBTQ bashing, though, it’s been worn off the desk. Finally, one piece illustrates reproduction vs. pleasure, where pleasure is initially defined as ⚢ ⚣. Although a reply disagrees, there’s no homophobia in the response.

Sex

The topic of sex is perhaps the most significant point of divergence between UChicago and Brown. On one hand, UChicago has more penis drawings, even when accounting for the different corpus size. On the other hand, it seems like Brown has more of everything else.

Chicago has 43 sexually-focused words out of 9209– .4%. Brown has 70 such words out of 5352– 1.3%. For a comparison, see the following chart. Please keep in mind that the Brown corpus is about half the size of the UChicago corpus:

(% is percentage of the total uses of the word that are sexual, for those words that also have a non-sexual meaning. “Penis” and “Vagina” also include uses of “dick, cock, dong” and “pussy, cunt”, respectively.)

As you can see above, UChicago and Brown have a comparable amount of fucking (slightly more sexually at UChicago), but there is a great deal more sexual sucking at Brown. In fact, almost half the sucking at Brown is sexual, whereas both “fuck” and “suck” are used sexually only 16% of the time at UChicago.

UChicago has more penis references, even when taking the relative corpora sizes into consideration, but vaginas are referenced about 8x more often at Brown than UChicago.

The gems

Perhaps I’ve been a bit hard on Brown graffiti in this blog post. The fact is, walking into a study area covered in graffiti gave me a taste of the thrill I first felt when I started taking pictures in the Regenstein Library. It gave this project a much-needed jolt of life and made me want to write a blog post for the first time in over a month.

My favorite pieces of graffiti tend to be ones that don’t fit well under any header in a blog post highlighting the major trends at a given school. There’s ellipsis turning into bubbles from the mouth of a hungry fish. There’s Go Go Gadget Shroud of Turin, which feels like it should be an item in UChicago’s famous Scav Hunt. There’s “I used to believe but now I’m incredible“. There’s a quote from W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One“. But I’d like to close with an adapted quote from Rumi:

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are so many ways.

¹ This seems like a trivial point, but it’s not a given. Just wait until I write about Arizona State University’s graffiti.

² UChicago folks may be quick to mention that Brown is the lowest-ranked of the Ivies (#16 in the current rankings– compared to UChicago at #8). A good case can be made that rankings say very little, and UChicago was a more interesting and quirky place before the administration started making the changes that improved our ranking. There’s probably something to the idea that Brown’s image doesn’t include the intellectual firepower of UChicago; nonetheless, I think it’s hard to argue that it’s not a peer institution, all UChicago elitism aside.

³ There’s a fair amount of French, German and Greek graffiti, if anyone wants to help out with the translation. Just comment on the Flickr photo or e-mail me.

It’s not that politics are absent entirely from the graffiti; since I started taking pictures in September 2007, I’ve found eight pieces that relate to politics. There’s one discussion about the United Nations and two post-election pieces about Obama, but the majority of political graffiti sprung up in the run-up to the 2008 election.

The United Nations

There’s an ongoing discussion about the UN in the B-level men’s bathroom. Of all the possible reasons to object to the United Nations, American nationalism seems to be the only one in play:

Obama

Former neighbor, faculty member, parent to children in UChicago’s primary school, and current President. That said, UofC is also the school building the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, a decision which led to an outbreak of graffiti elsewhere on campus.

Those two positions can be summed up in the following two pieces of graffiti:

Listen and read all you liberal Obama (socialist) – the American Lenin – loving hippies of UChicago. “If you let the gov’t run the Sahara desert, in 10 yrs. it will be out of sand.” (or something close to this) – M[ilton].F[riedman].

2008 Election

The biggest outbreak of political graffiti related to the 2008 election. Someone expressed dislike for Obama as early as November 2007 (and possibly quite earlier; I picked it up on my first pass through the study carrels that November, and can’t guess how long it might have been there.)

In October 2007, there was some speculation as to the size of Hillary Clinton’s dick:

A little over six months later, as she was clinging to the remains of her campaign, she appeared again as the Black Knight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and General Custer on an A-level whiteboard.

I don’t usually keep an eye on the graffiti added to the posters that line the stairs going down to the student-run cafe in the library, but this piece of graffiti transforming a stupid ironic poster (an ad for some kind of concert, if you’re able to read the tiny, tiny print at the bottom) into a political statement about Sarah Palin literally made me laugh out loud:

However, my very favorite piece of election graffiti comes from an ardent Nader supporter, who at some point in 2007 carved “Nader ’07″ into one of the wood study desks in the stacks… having forgotten that the election wasn’t for another year.

Much ink has been spilled on the topic of youth apathy towards politics, stemming from a perception that nothing one says or does will make much of a difference. I think the frequency and nature of the graffiti largely supports that assessment of youth attitudes.

The United Nations discussion seems like someone’s pet issue– I can’t think of any particular event recently that it’s likely to be reacting to.

The post-election pro-Obama graffiti could be attributed in part to a sense of local pride. The anti-Obama framing of the Milton Friedman quote is phrased in such an extreme way that it seems equally possible that the whole thing is meant ironically. Even if it’s serious, I’d argue that the focus of the graffiti is Milton Friedman, more than Obama– the timing (early May) doesn’t coincide with any particular milestones, though it’s shortly after the navel-gazing marking the first 100 days of his presidency, and perhaps that was what triggered the outburst.

Regardless, presidential elections are perhaps the one situation where participation in politics yields immediate, visible results, if only in the form of a staffing change in the highest office. If there’s ever a time for the cynical and disenfranchised to be writing political graffiti, the run-up to a presidential election seems like the most likely candidate.

We’ll see what happens in 2012.

The “analysis” considers:

1. Happiness, as measured in the ratio to smiley faces to frowny faces
2. Love vs. hate, with a spiffy Venn diagram of the objects of the aforementioned emotions
3. Sex: to what extent are ostensibly “sexual” words used in a sexual way?
4. Anatomy: a comparison of the frequency with which male vs. female body parts are drawn and/or referenced
5. Temporal fluctuations in love, despair, and sex graffiti

For my pedantic readers (including my beloved husband), or anyone else who missed the “pseudo-” part of the “pseudo-scientific analysis”, let me note that the sample size for any of this is too small to make any actual conclusions. Furthermore:

1. Smiley faces and frowny faces basically function as punctuation, and their scope is almost always limited to the statement(s) they accompany. I know they’re not an indicator of general happiness or unhappiness. But I couldn’t resist the idea of a smiley-to-frowny-face ratio.



2. Yes, it’s possible that people just write more love graffiti than hate graffiti, and the difference in graffiti frequency isn’t reflective of people’s private emotions. Please get over it.
3. I’d actually like to look into the frequency of non-sexual uses of the “sexual” terms mentioned in the post, across a larger corpus of English. Maybe there’s nothing special about the graffiti data.
4. There’s a graph depicting a vagina in the B-level men’s room, but I consider the B-level men’s room graffiti to be almost a different data set, and I didn’t include other material from bathrooms.
5. Including the graffiti from the carrels might change the conclusions about the temporal fluctuations of love, despair, and sex. But I really have no way to date those (I’ve gone to the carrels 3-4 times in 2 years) so… tough cookies.