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Statistical Analysis of U of Chicago Graffiti
quaith writes "Quinn Dombrowski, a member of the University of Chicago's central IT staff, has been recording the graffiti left in the Joseph Regenstein Library Since September 2007. To date she has photographed and transcribed over 620 pieces of graffiti; over 410 of them are datable to within a week of their creation. She has now published in Inkling Magazine a statistical analysis of the entire graffiti collection covering such subjects as love, hate, despair, sex, anatomy, and temporal fluctuations of each of these. After November, both love and despair graffiti drop off significantly until spring, while sex graffiti reaches its one and only peak in December before declining for the rest of the school year. The story includes links to all of the original graffiti photos, which the researcher has made freely available to use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license."
I must say there is a good amount of documentation. Now I know that I am more likely to come across a happy smile face than a sad face.
They're thinking, they're feeling. And they want you to know. That's why they paint it on walls, cliffs and carve it into the school benches. There's this school of thought that believes that it will go away if nobody reads it. But they've really never done something, stood a few feet away and sighed about getting it off your head. Ignoring it and waiting for it to go away is dumb.
Keeping tabs on the expression gives you a much more clear indication of what the pulse of the otherwise silent are thinking. This is a fun experiment because nobody wall painting is doing it because they want to be part of a statistic ... unlike a girl with a clipboard asking questions.
I remember being in a train in melbourne, riding past a few walls full of legal graffiti (union lane?) and wondering what the line between art and vandalism really was.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
We also have some brilliant graffiti in the grout between the tiles in the downstairs bathroom in the Bartlett dining commons. For example,
"I'm a celebrity, get me grout of here!"
"Commutator subgrout of prime order"
"I'm on the groutside looking in"
"What's this all agrout?"
But a sample of 620 pieces over three years isn't large enough for useful analysis. I'd like to see this concept applied to graffiti large cities. I'm sure there are crews responsible for removing the graffiti that could document it in the process.
I think regardless of where you find it or what type of person are, graffiti is pretty entertaining and intriguing. I think the most amusing graffiti I've seen that encompasses about every walk of life, rank or status and is among the same topic fairing FTFA above was in a Port-a-john during different points in my life, most notably when I was deployed in Iraq. Considering the type of foot traffic that hit these port-a-john's is much more broader than the foot traffic that hits a university library and the fact that, at least when I was in basic training, it was a push-up affair every time you didn't have a black ballpoint pen on your person, the odds were pretty high for someone to carve their opinion in any artistic form into the wall for everyone else to ponder AND respond to.
It's almost a comical affair now to realize I used to go out of my way to keep track of all the "Black Ninja Rule Number n" and actually look for them when I was pouring sweat trying to take a crap or try to unbuckle 50lbs worth of gear and stow it beside me with I pissed in those crackjack boxes.
You can use the same logic to say that having laws against murder and rape is equally futile, because you can't physically prevent people from doing whatever they want to do without massively encroaching on their basic rights.
No-no-no, no-no-no!
Laws are not there to forbid you, but to protect me. I have the basic right of living, you cannot kill me. The fish does not have that right, so you can kill and eat it. Then it gets more complex as laws become the mirror of society: you cannot hug all the fishes and must share them, so killing is limited. On the other hand, you can share information because it cannot take part in a tragedy of the common.
Well, that's the theory. In practice it's something on which you can go ad absurdum.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)