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September 5, 2013 9:59 AM   Subscribe

Wedding Crunchers: An n-gram analysis of wedding announcements in the New York Times going back to 1981. See, for example, the decline in elite prep schools, how well the five boroughs are represented, or the rise (and fall) of hedge fund managers among the newly wed. The site's creator offers a more detailed look over at Rap Genius.
posted by Cash4Lead (12 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
I hope someone is starting a hedge fund that makes investment decisions based on patters in the Times Mergers and Acquisitions page.
posted by ocschwar at 10:11 AM on September 5, 2013


Cute site; it's worth paying attention to the absolute frequency percentages over on the X-axis, though, for a bit of a reality check on what sometimes look like quite meaningful "trends." Changes from .0001% to .0002% aren't really that big a deal.
posted by yoink at 10:30 AM on September 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


N-gram analysis is fun. Don't forget there's a version of this for Metafilter (post titles only, for now): http://mefingram.appspot.com/
posted by jjwiseman at 11:05 AM on September 5, 2013


yoink: "Cute site; it's worth paying attention to the absolute frequency percentages over on the X-axis, though, for a bit of a reality check on what sometimes look like quite meaningful "trends." Changes from .0001% to .0002% aren't really that big a deal."

Eh, you can't really rely on the absolute frequencies to tell you anything, since most n-grams of interest are pretty rare. This is why we have to use log probabilities when we do things like train a Hidden Markov Model on trigram data. Whether such a change is significant really depends on the corpus size and what the "true" frequency distribution for that n-gram is.
posted by invitapriore at 11:24 AM on September 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


I grew up reading the wedding announcements in the Times--I'm not sure why, but I've always flipped through, even as a little boy. I plugged a few terms into the viewer and was surprised to see so many headlines that read like "Marjorie Weiss Weds Banker" and "Jennifer Seidow to be married." I didn't remember them being so bride-centric. Maybe that was just the search terms I was using, but it seemed too frequent to be a fluke.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 11:30 AM on September 5, 2013


Cash4Lead: " the decline in elite prep schools"

Invalid, they didn't look for St. Paul's.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:51 AM on September 5, 2013


Can we see the same data with public divorce filings involving hedge fund managers?
posted by T.D. Strange at 11:56 AM on September 5, 2013


Invalid, they didn't look for St. Paul's.

Wouldn't have made much of a difference. And anyway, the point is to show the (relative) decline of WASP culture in the NYT wedding announcements. I've should have paired it with the rise in non-Anglo names.
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:01 PM on September 5, 2013


Grantland's Katie Baker runs a monthly deep analysis of the NYT Vows column, including a Society Scorecard in which betrothed earn points for their university affiliations, their society status and their professions.
posted by Rock Steady at 12:15 PM on September 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


I was just being snarky - my wife went to St. Paul's and hated every minute of it.

Their latest alumni magazine ("Alumni Horae") has a picture of a blue blazer and a straw boater on the cover. SPS transcends parody.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:27 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Chrysostom: "Their latest alumni magazine ("Alumni Horae") "

Alumni Times? reh.
posted by boo_radley at 12:33 PM on September 5, 2013


Ugly laugh.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 5:41 PM on September 5, 2013


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