Monday, December 28, 2009

three words to describe 2009: an analysis

I was looking at Richard Wiseman's* blog, and noticed these two posts where he asked male and female commenters to post three words that describe 2009 for them.  I'm sure he's going to do some kind of analysis on it eventually, but because I am supposed to be writing a paper, I couldn't resist downloading the posts and checking out the differences.  I haven't run my grep-awk-uniq-count magic on it yet, but it's interesting that right off the bat the women-post mentions "stress" 26 times while the man-post mentions it 7 times.

Men's post:  If you are male, read this!

Women's post: If you are female, read this!

*Note: It is not really clear to me who this guy is.


Edit:  I calculated word frequencies.  I made a half-assed attempt to get rid of non-applicable text in the page.  This is probably inaccurate but gives a general gist.


Women:

15 love
13 stressful
11 sad
11 hope
11 fun
10 stress
10 new
10 busy
9 change
8 growth
8 frustrating
8 friends
7 challenging
6 work
6 sex
6 life
6 fast
6 family





Men:


31 change
18 love
15 hope
11 work
11 fun
8 happy
7 science
6 unemployed
6 stress
6 friends
6 death
5 travel
5 success
5 struggle
5 obama
5 climate
5 busy
4 words
4 twitter

Edit 2: I should so be working instead of mucking around with this.

Edit 3: Comments were broken on my blog? Thanks niniane for telling me!  Should be all fixed.  Comment away.

Edit 4:  Dude.  At least I called tolower() in my half-assed attempt to clean things up.  The original author's generated word clouds.

8 comments:

  1. So "love" and "hope" are shared between the lists. The only difference is that women have "stressful" and "sad" where men have "change" and "work".

    The men were probably stressed & sad too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. and men have "twitter", "science", "unemployed", and "climate". women mention "family", men don't. looking at the original post, i remember feeling like the men used more bleak depressing words. like "death".

    ReplyDelete
  3. The best parts of this post are our updates and note about how you're not really sure who that Richard guy is. haha!

    Love how you took the time to pull out the keywords from comments and made it somewhat relevant. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. In the top 5 of both M& W Hope & Fun seem to be a close tie. And if one were to add the W stressful & stress we get a count of 23 which may equate to the Change (31) for M ...all in all pretty balanced scorecard I would say ?

    ReplyDelete
  5. all I noticed was that women had sex and men didn't....

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is a test to see if Neha's awesome blog comments are working.

    ReplyDelete
  7. This is a test to see if Neha's awesome blog comments are working.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I wish not agree on it. I regard as precise post. Particularly the appellation attracted me to read the sound story.

    ReplyDelete