Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur » data set http://www.crescatgraffiti.com Confessions of the University of Chicago Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:28:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 A pseudo-scientific analysis of the graffiti, with disclaimers for the pedantic http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/2010/02/02/pseudo-scientific-analysis-of-graffiti-with-disclaimers-for-pedanti/ http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/2010/02/02/pseudo-scientific-analysis-of-graffiti-with-disclaimers-for-pedanti/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:28:14 +0000 Quinn http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/?p=715 About a month ago, I was invited to put together a guest post for Inkling Magazine, and the resulting pseudo-scientific analysis of the graffiti is now up!

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.
]]> http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/2010/02/02/pseudo-scientific-analysis-of-graffiti-with-disclaimers-for-pedanti/feed/ 0 Crescat Graffiti: The Word Cloud http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/2010/01/18/crescat-graffiti-the-word-cloud/ http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/2010/01/18/crescat-graffiti-the-word-cloud/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:15:00 +0000 Quinn http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/?p=612 After a couple weeks of off-and-on data entry, I’ve finally put together a Google Docs spreadsheet with all the text from the Reg graffiti collection, and a brief description of all the doodles.

More data crunching is coming in the days ahead, but I’d like to start things off with a couple quick-and-flashy word clouds, courtesy of Wordle. Click to see the full-size versions.

Graffiti text

Doodles

]]> http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/2010/01/18/crescat-graffiti-the-word-cloud/feed/ 0 Crescat Graffiti: The Data Set http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/2009/12/31/crescat-graffiti-the-data-set/ http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/2009/12/31/crescat-graffiti-the-data-set/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:21:41 +0000 Quinn http://www.crescatgraffiti.com/?p=539 Until recently, I’ve thought of Crescat Graffiti as an art/anthropology project, and it never occurred to me to treat it as a data set. But now that’s what I’m doing as part of putting together a guest post for a science magazine. I love a good data set, but in the process of making it I’m finding myself wracked with indecision about how much metadata to capture. Sure, I could just type out all the words, and I could make a pretty word cloud or a word-count list, but I find myself thinking about what other avenues might be fruitful.

  • Differentiating walls from whiteboards from study carrels
  • Date
    • Quarter
    • Year
    • Month? Day?
  • Granularity
    • Word-level
    • Sentence level?
    • Graffiti-post level? – you could do things like count average number of words in a piece of graffiti
  • Writing implement?

I could do any or all of these, but I wonder how many of them are going to yield any actual interesting results.

Then there’s the question of format. I was initially thinking public Google Doc spreadsheet, but I prefer doing my data crunching using XSLT, which suggests XML. (And I find it easier to go from XML to spreadsheet than the other way around.) That said, if I’m going the XML route, I’m doing my own schema– no doubt there’s a way to encode all of the things I want using TEI, but I’d prefer to have at least an ounce of sanity left by the time I’m done with this.

The data set will be free for anyone to use, so if you’ve got preferences (other than using TEI) or suggestions for what metadata I should include, do leave a comment.

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