Other lines just aren’t interested in it. But why is it so different?

September 5, 2013 6:46 AM

You might think that Waterloo & City Line couldn’t even have a Myers-Briggs Type, being a tunnel in London with some trains in it, but you’d be wrong. Whilst the normal way to establish a Myers-Briggs Type is get someone to fill in a questionnaire, it’s apparently possible to use a sample of text to analyse the personality of the author. And while the Waterloo & City Line didn’t have much to say for most of its 115 year history, for the last couple of years, it, and all the other London Underground lines, have been tweeting. So I use samples of tweets to discover what kinds of personalities they have.
posted by v21 (7 comments total)

Ha! This is great. Went to an awesome place. Not the Waterloo line, the article. The Waterloo line goes nowhere.

I'm kind of obsessed with the Train lines and their relation to each other in New York, and not only because the first few months I was here every conversation I was in seemed to start with a list of incomprehensible numbers and letters. I like to imagine each of them having their own unique personality and connections to each other and history based on their geography. Fortunately twitter stepped up to further this fiction for me.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:55 AM on September 5, 2013

To be honest, I didn’t learn anything interesting about the Waterloo & City Line from this journey.

So say we all.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:03 AM on September 5, 2013

Intrigued by the analysis and in slight disagreement with the results (Jubilee Line, ESTJ? Surely not!), I did some testing of my own. Using the uClassify application, I pasted in and analysed a selection of my own recent tweets. The result:

1. Sensing (98.5 %)
2. iNtuition (1.5 %)

I then pasted in a few paragraphs from the article I'm currently writing. The results of that analysis:

1. iNtuition (84.3 %)
2. Sensing (15.7 %)

It is as I suspected: Twitter itself is to blame here. It somehow bleeds the N out of everything. So I would like to suggest that Ed Jefferson's groundbreaking work on LUL and MBTI is not the final word on the topic.

Anyone familiar with the London Underground would also be able to tell you that MBTI results would almost certainly vary according to time of the week also. The Northern Line and the DLR, for instance, become exceedingly introverted at weekends for some reason. So we need some kind of linguistic corpus analysis that's sophisticated enough to pick up on that.
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:34 AM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

In London transport, it's not the tube lines but the bike hire system that needs cycle-analysis.

Mind! The gap!
posted by Devonian at 7:42 AM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

This seems like a good place to recommend TLF Travel Alerts as a fun Twitter feed to follow. I don't live in London, but how I can resist alerts like:

We crossed the streams. Total protonic reversal at Blackhorse Road as an Overground and Victoria line train get confused. Minor delays.

Trains on the metropolitan line are simultaneously delayed and not delayed due to an uncollapsed wave function at Moorgate.

TIP: If a paper clip asks “It looks like you’re trying to run a large, integrated urban transport network - would you like help?”, say no.

And this set from Sept 2

TRANSFER NEWS: The Jubilee line has signed Marylebone station from the Bakerloo line for an undisclosed fee.

Marylebone station said that it was 'excited about the project at the Jubilee' and that the move has ‘come at the right time’.

Confusion in North London as Arsenal have bid £40.01 for Kilburn, thinking this would trigger a release clause. It hasn't.

posted by maryr at 7:59 AM on September 5, 2013 [5 favorites]

The uClassify site is interesting. I used the text from five of my longest MeFi comments and ran the four separate MBTI-related classifiers on it. And there's one that sort of does all the types at once. The separate classifiers judged me to be an INTJ, which is close, but I never score "J", always "P". Maybe an artifact of the topic of the comments, though they were quite diverse. The all-in-one classifier rightly found me to be INFP. The gender classifier thought I was slightly more likely to be female than male. And the age classifier placed me in the 65+ bracket. Huh.

I liked the topic classifiers ... those could be handy.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 2:50 PM on September 5, 2013

Ok, I am super charmed by these twitter feeds.

Good evening all, Pauline in tonight good service currently on the line.

Good afternoon, Mark & Alex C here with line updates. There’s currently a good service in operation and we’ll let you know of any changes.

Good Morning London! Sol & Ahmed here to update you with the latest on the line today. There is a good service in operation. Enjoy your day!
posted by threeants at 10:40 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]