Website with interactive chart that displays the words Occidental College students use when discussing various topics on the OxyConfessions Facebook page. As a result, the attitudes of Occidental College students (who post anonymously on the page) toward various topics may be loosely extrapolated.
It is a nickname for Occidental College.
With the help of the OxyConfessions Facebook admin.
Yes, the current list of words is: ["through", "why", "very", "thing", "things", "7", "here's", "dont", "don’t", "im", "they're", "want", "i'm", "I’m", "y'all", "I'm", "you're", "I've", "it’s", "It's", "it's", "It’s", "what's", "I'd", "who's", "let's", "there's", "that's", "he's", "she's", "who's", "someone's", "you'd", "sean", "wouldn't", "2", "still", "can't", "take", "also", "never", "every", "please", "isn", "around", "getting", "here", "me", "say", "does", "any", "going", "person", "should", "after", "year", "those", "where", "thing", "only", "var", "too", "something", "much", "someone", "even", "being", "am", "know", "really", "column1", "don't", "just", "Joe", "campus", input, "our", "feel", "because", "think", "oxy", "students", "be", "the", "of", "and", "a", "to", "in", "is", "you", "that", "it", "he", "was", "for", "on", "are", "as", "with", "his", "they", "I", "at", "be", "this", "have", "from", "or", "one", "had", "by", "word", "but", "not", "what", "all", "were", "we", "when", "your", "can", "said", "there", "use", "an", "each", "which", "do", "how", "their", "if", "will", "up", "other", "about", "out", "many", "then", "them", "these", "so", "some", "her", "would", "make", "like", "him", "into", "time", "has", "look", "two", "more", "write", "go", "see", "number", "no", "way", "could", "people", "people's", "my", "than", "first", "water", "been", "call", "who", "oil", "its", "now", "find", "long", "down", "day", "did", "get", "come", "a.m.", "made", "may", "part"];
While filtering which words will be displayed on a graph may seem unethical for a data analysis project, only neutral words that carried no sentimental value were filtered. Still, determining which words were meaningful and which were neutral was a dilemma in itself, and jeopardized many key trends found within the data. For example, before expanding the filter beyond the 100 most common English words, the word “me” would consistently be the most used word across all topics. While this trend could have potentially hinted toward psychological egoism being the driving force behind the success of the OxyConfession page, it also reduced the variance in words used across all topic, defeating the entertainment aspect of the website.
Yes and no. In terms of displaying the top 15 most frequently used words in the selected posts, the graph is extremely accurate. However, in terms of accurately portraying the overall attitudes of Oxy students toward various topics, the graph can sometimes miss the mark. Because OxyConfessions posts vary in length, purpose, and emotion, some posts will repeat a word a great number of times, inaccurately conveying the notion that other Oxy students share this attitude. Furthermore, the small sample size (<25,000) limits the variance in word frequency distribution, making it more likely for situations like this to occur. Because of this, no one should rely on this information alone to publish a study.
Aside from seeing how students feel about various topics, unlike on Facebook, one may search through every post published since 2013 containing a keyword or phrase in milliseconds.