NGram Tracking Affect of USNews Rankings

College Search & Selection
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<p>So, it was a pretty snowy Boxing Day back east, giving me plenty of time to tweak the Ngram we started with, comparing Wesleyan, Williams and Amherst. And, after much experimentation, I found that if you include the definite article before the name of each college, it cuts down on the overlaps, both with other Wesleyans and with scholarly citations of Wesleyan University Press.</p>

<p>From that, I created the following table tracking five LACs from the publication of the earliest USNews polls, circa 1985:
Google</a> Ngram Viewer</p>

<p>It turns out that there has been remarkably little movement, in terms of hardcopy book "chatter", in the relative positions of Williams, Wesleyan, Amherst, Bowdoin and Swarthmore over the period covered by the USNews rankings. If anything, there seems to be something of an inverse relationship between Wesleyan and Swarthmore's USNews rankings and the number of times each gets mentioned in print over the same period. Is this just because the book business tends to be more conservative than the magazine business or popular culture in general?</p>

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<p>The surge for Wesleyan roughly parallels the rise to iconic status of Bill Bellichick, the coach of the New England Patriots. Bellichick is an anomaly as an NFL coaching legend who came out of a D-III background, so when he’s written about, his Wesleyan roots are often cited.</p>

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<p>“affect” a noun with the first syllable accentuated, is a psychological term referring to the amount of emotion present in a person’s exterior appearance.</p>

<p>I get it mixed up all the time affect/effect as noun, verb, so unlike a lot of people, I try to keep them straight :)</p>

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<p>You get a ton more results when you don’t have “the” in front of the names of every college.</p>

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<p>Obama gave the commencement speech at Wesleyan in May 2008, standing in for the ill Teddy Kennedy. That was widely covered by the media, and perhaps led to a big bump in references to Wesleyan in 2008.</p>

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<p>I don’t think popular culture even knows the existence of Williams, Wesleyan, Amherst, Bowdoin and Swarthmore. They are boutique schools, not known by the masses. Of course, all are outstanding schools, lest someone think that I’m confusing “not broadly known” with “not good.”</p>

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<p>““affect” a noun with the first syllable accentuated, is a psychological term referring to the amount of emotion present in a person’s exterior appearance.”</p>

<p>Aren’t we supposed to track Waslayan?</p>

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<p>DunninLA - I think you’re correct in that the word, “effect” seems to track rather closely the growth of the Industrial/Scientific Revolutions: [Google</a> Ngram Viewer](<a href=“http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=effect%2Caffect&year_start=1500&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3]Google”>http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=effect%2Caffect&year_start=1500&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3) But, I almost like the idea that the net result of twenty-five years of USNews rankings is greater usage of emoticons. :)</p>

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<p>manarius - yes, you do get a ton more results without the “the”. However, it would bias the survey in favor of Wesleyan two ways: 1) it would include a lot of other Wesleyans other than the one in New England (although, not as many as you might think): [Google</a> Ngram Viewer](<a href=“http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Wesleyan+University,Ohio+Wesleyan+University,Indiana+Wesleyan+University,Illinois+Wesleyan+University,Nebraska+Wesleyan+University,Southern+Wesleyan+University,Kansas+Wesleyan+University,Oklahoma+Wesleyan+University&year_start=1793&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3]Google”>http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Wesleyan+University,Ohio+Wesleyan+University,Indiana+Wesleyan+University,Illinois+Wesleyan+University,Nebraska+Wesleyan+University,Southern+Wesleyan+University,Kansas+Wesleyan+University,Oklahoma+Wesleyan+University&year_start=1793&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)
and, 2) would include an enormous number of footnotes and scholarly references which would include the Wesleyan University Press: [Google</a> Ngram Viewer](<a href=“http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Wesleyan+University+Press&year_start=1793&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3]Google”>http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Wesleyan+University+Press&year_start=1793&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)</p>

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<p>If you are picking colleges on the basis of rankings and media mention, sound bytes, popularity…there isnt much I can say to help you.</p>

<p>Best of luck with that.</p>

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<p>I think both the USNews rankings and the CC Forum are forms of popular culture, in the sense that they have a kind of entertainment value. Or, does knowledge of something have to reach “iconic” proportions in order to qualify as popular?</p>