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PART 1
What kind of content is on urban dictionary?
Urban dictionary is pretty infamous for the explicit content of its website, but just how explicit is it? In this section, I want to first look at sentiment scores throughout the years, before generating word clouds of common words used in the word of the day posts.
Word Clouds
Disclaimer
2016
2019
Disclaimer
1/5
By no surprise, we can see that the commonly (and uncommonly)-used words are pretty explicit. Nevertheless, it is still interesting to note how most of the words are really centered around human interaction and seem to directly involve a reference to some kind of social relation. This, in my opinion, dovetails quite well with the whole idea of language as a means of socialization.
I also think that these clouds accurately show that urban dictionary refuses to put a filter on its content and really be a place where all types of language are accepted. That being said, it is still very NSFW!
Definition Sentiment Over the Years
Upon performing afinn sentiment analysis on the definitions of each word, it appears that there is an overall negative sentiment of the website. As evidenced by the word clouds, there is a substantial number of swear words used in the definitions and the low scores could be resulting from this.
Overall, I think that performing sentiment analysis on these reviews may not be the most effective means of assessing the content. Colloquial english has a tendency to use more swear words in not necessarily explicit content, and maybe there's a lot of room here to perform more effective sentiment analysis (maybe a future research topic for myself?).
PART 2
Do Urban Dictionary Word-of-the-Days influence search trends?
A good way to see what people are currently thinking about is to see what they're searching for. Google Trends looks to gather this data in real time, to hopefully capture trending topics. In this section, I hope to utilize this tool in order to test my hypothesis that urban dictionary influences search trends.
Overall Methodology:
After scraping all of the daily words from urban dictionary's website, I then decided to only look at words after 2016 (data processing time and timeout errors). Then, for each of the words, I utilized gTrendsR to find the number of hits 10 days before and after the listed date. I then aggregated and partitioned these numbers in various ways, which I will elaborate on in the following sections.
As a brief introduction, I would like to include examples of google searches where urban dictionary seemed to publish a word of the day based on pop culture versus when urban dictionary might have influenced trends. There are screengrabs taken directly from Google Trends:
Influenced by Trends:
"belfie" is a term that was first popularized by Kim Kardashian. It seems as if Urban Dictionary was inspired by the abrupt search trends and decided to include this in their word of the day
Causing Trends
Here is a good example of where it seems as if urban dictionary influenced search trends with the word "handcestors". After virtually no hits before the listing date, there was a huge uptick afterwards, but the word did not seem to have caught on as it quickly died out afterwards.
I hope that these examples demonstrate the relationship between urban dictionary and google trends that I am looking to explore. Moving forward, I hypothesize that Urban Dictionary does influence pop-culture which can be evidenced an increased number of searches post-release.
Comparing Overall Before and After Hit Numbers with Various Summary Statistics Nu
I first wanted to look at general aggregate numbers of my data.
total_sum
Mean
Max
We can see that across all summary statistics, words began to trend after the day than before it was posted. Looking at total sums, we can see that the overall number of searches was higher after than before. We can also see that the average number of hits was greater before the day than after, indicating that the difference was relatively persistent throughout the time periods. Finally, average maximums tells us that the highest time when the word was trending typically occurred after it was posted on Urban Dictionary. Overall, these statistics demonstrates that urban dictionary does seem to have influence over what is being searched, as it increases overall number of hits, as well as "max trending" moments.
Breaking Down Aggregate Statistics By Year
Here, we can see that the number of hits for each of the words have been increasing over the years, with a dropoff in 2019. The 2019 dropoff, however, expected, as much of the data from 2019 could not be used as Google Trends only allows searches before a certain date. The general uptick in trends could be due to a variety of factors including more use of urban dictionary, more effective data collection by Google Trends, and overall Increased internet usage.
When we break down the maximum by year, we can see that the average maximum before the date steadily seemed to be increasing over the years, while the maximum after the date stead relatively consistent. Moreover in 2019, the average maximum after the date dropped suddenly, while the average maximum before the date continued to grow. This is also an interesting trend, because if we look at the Total Sums graph, we see that while there were more impressions every year, the gap between the before and after hits stayed relatively the same.
I think that this trend demonstrates that while urban dictionary is influential as a while, the influence of urban dictionary seems to have been decreasing over the years. I personally would not necessarily trust the 2019 statistics just yet, given that there is much less data from this year, as evidenced by the total sum graph.
CONCLUSION
The Influence of Urban Dictionary
In conclusion, it appears as if Urban Dictionary both reflects and impacts our every day language. From Part 1, we can see that the most frequently used terms on Urban Dictionary are swear words as expected, and the sentiment analysis also reflects this. From Part 2, we can see that Urban Dictionary does seem to influence search trends. After breaking it down by years, however, the site's influence does seem to be going down.
Overall, the evolution of language happens very gradually, and it's hard to determine what words will truly stick and grow with the language. Sites like Urban Dictionary could be interpreted as inappropriate and grotesque, but allowing people to freely choose and define their words will inevitably lead to better communication, and will hopefully help us understand each other in more ways than one.
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