Apologies for a silent winter quarter– the graffiti project tends to slide towards hibernation in the winter in general (I took no pictures at all in winter ’09), and it was compounded this year by heaps of stress and moving. Fear not, though, I still went to the stacks weekly, so let’s catch up on [...]
Friday, December 31, 2010
This is the last in a five-part series of posts describing the results of my analysis of my graffiti corpora. I strongly recommend you read “Prelude to a graffiti analysis” first to understand the methodology, data, and sampling. You might also be interested in part 1, Arizona State University; part 2, University of Colorado – [...]
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Over the next six weeks, I’ll be posting a set of results from my recent graffiti analysis, done with some degree of seriousness this time. The last time I put together a (tongue-in-cheek) analysis of the data, it was a smash hit that got the attention of Slashdot, the Wall Street Journal tech blog, and [...]
Saturday, November 6, 2010
It’s taken some time, but graffiti is creeping back onto the bookstack walls in the Regenstein Library. 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) [...]
I’ve got to hand it to Facilities: painting over the graffiti in the Regenstein Library at the end of last school year has done wonders for keeping the stacks pristine all summer and into the start of this school year. In fact, even now there seems to be only one piece of new graffiti on [...]
Sometime between April 13th and today, the great purge came to the B-level men’s room in the Regenstein Library, clearing away the philosophical wordplay that made it truly the nerdiest place on earth. (Cue the sad trombones.) But fear not, the stalls are not bare– even though the graffiti has had no more than a [...]
The students responsible for the now world-famous* hieroglyphic sex graffiti have returned to express their love for Egypt. I ran this one by my expert Egyptologist, and in addition to translating it they had some fascinating remarks about the characters they chose to render ‘Egypt’: Egypt here is written with the “foreign land” determinative (hill-shapes) [...]
In the last couple weeks, there’s been a couple noteworthy doodles on the blackboards in the Crerar the study rooms that strike me as a bit creepier than anything I’ve seen in the corresponding A-level spaces of the Reg, or elsewhere on campus. The first was in one of the green rooms on the third [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
It’s 5th week, which means more students are heading to the Reg to study for midterms. (Or not study, as the case may be.) During the last few months, the Crescat Graffiti blog has ventured beyond the Regenstein Library to explore the graffiti in Harper (mostly-not-my-gender) bathrooms, in far-flung dorms, in other campus libraries, at [...]
People who aren’t familiar with the Regenstein Library have asked me whether writing graffiti there is some sort of student ritual. I’ve assured them it isn’t– it’s just a manifestation of student stress and boredom, and/or perhaps a small creative outlet, that takes place in the building where a lot of students study. But these [...]
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