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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.
Who is this researcher to relicense their works of art? Just because they can't complain!
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
When the library at the local community college had a wooden tables in the study area, there was a rich history of graffiti from 20 years of students studying for exams. When they build a new library with modern non-wood tables, the graffiti no longer existed. The florescent pen graffiti on the condom machines in the restrooms was a poor substitute.
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?"
I doubt any widely-relevant conclusions at all can be drawn from this analysis. It is somewhat interesting, but the hundreds of samples (which is not really that many) are probably created by a mere handful of individuals, most all of whom belong to a particular group - male undergraduate students, 18-24, residing in or near a certain Chicago neighborhood. So certainly there is no way to apply any findings to any larger group. A fun exercise for statistics nerds, perhaps, but of little scientific value.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
This may be the BEST counterargument ever to "all information should be free". Bravo!
However, while I genuinely want to mod you up, I do believe that CURRENT laws to control information are stupid. Similar to how laws can sometimes be unfairly and maliciously used to allow known murderers to remain innocent and walk freely, many patents and copyrights are unfairly and maliciously used to prevent people from contributing to the greater good of humanity. Patents in particular are a minefield -- something's clearly wrong with a system that encourages trolls to cripple the true innovators.
Back to the topic, I believe what the researcher did, copyrighting her photographs, is all right, regardless of whether she released it under Creative Commons. I don't believe she was copyrighting the actual message on the graffiti anyway, just the expression of it on photograph. (Of course properly the copyright should be attributed to both HER and whoever made the graffiti, but then I would suppose THAT's public domain since the original author didn't stake a claim to it...)
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
I don't agree.
From a judicial POV some act may be vandalism / destructive act to property without the owner agreeing.
From an artistic POV the same act may still be art.
Of course "doing art" so someones property without agreement is a problem.
However, the "lines" are not so easily spotted: What about chalking on the pavement or laser-projections on a publicly owned building?
Just wanted to throw out that technically she's violating the copyright of the graffiti owner, and cannot be distributing that work. I think all the graffiti authors should step forward and claim their share of her enormous royalties. If you are a graffiti writer, please click [this is a joke] to claim your giant prize.
This is my sig.
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.