| gvidas |
09-09-2010 01:40 AM |
It is very interesting. But it's slightly wrong to look at that and say, "that's a list of what (white/black/brown) people like."
Quote:
We then took all these people's profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group's essays statistically distinct from the others'.
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My take on that description of methodology is: they're not looking at the most commonly-liked things of an ethnic group, so much as the things which that ethnic group mentions, but no other ethnic group does. As in:
Quote:
For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it's a racial outlier.
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The other side of this is that none of the word-clouds include sushi. They're pinpointing the essay differences by race, which is fine, so long as you don't confuse "stuff that only white men express any interest in" for "stuff white people like."
If they made it just lists of the most common phrases by ethnic group, without a specific emphasis on the differences, you would find a much, much, much more boring list, tied much more deeply to pop culture. |
