“Wedding Crunchers” Shows Patterns Among Ivy League Engagement Announcements
When you’re announcing an engagement, what is the most important information to include about the two people who are planning to spend the rest of their lives together? A new website called “Wedding Crunchers” allows users to examine that question for themselves, and it seems that higher education is a popular choice when narrowing down the components of different lifestyles that make it into a wedding announcement.
The site was recently launched by the people behind Rap Genius, which is a Wikipedia-like database that annotates and interprets rap lyrics and other texts. For “Wedding Crunchers,” the site’s founders looked to a very different source: the New York Times. Typically regarded as a symbol of status, the Times’ wedding section reveals significant patterns when it comes to how marriage and society have changed over time.
Users can search a database of almost 60,000 NYT wedding announcements dating back to 1981, or they can let the site “show you a good search” itself. So-called “good searches” can compare, for example, the frequency of various nationalities in the articles or differences in brides’ ages over time.
How exactly does the database work? The y-axis of each graph it produces represents the frequency of each phrase, or “n-gram,” that is entered. This number is given as a percentage of all of the phrases in the articles that contain the same number of words. For example, entering “Dartmouth College” produces a graph that shows the number of times those two words appear in an article in that exact order, divided by the total number of two-word terms in all of the articles. Users then have the option of “smoothing” the graph, usually with a factor of one, as a means of taking moving averages. More complex search terms include plus signs and slashes, while less advanced searches merely involve separating terms with commas.
By typing in the names of each school separated by commas, one can see how often Ivy League institutions have been mentioned (see graph.) Columbia has been mentioned the most, with Dartmouth seeming to trail behind the rest. The website’s founders acknowledge that total student enrollment may play a factor in this regard, as Dartmouth is the smallest of the Ivies in that category. Additionally, Dartmouth is the furthest among these schools from New York; thus, it is conceivable that Dartmouth alumni are less likely to live in the city and therefore do not appear in the Times as often when they are married, whereas Columbia is physically located in NYC and probably has the highest percentage of graduates located there.
Elite universities tend to send many graduates to Wall Street, however, and Dartmouth is no different. After adjusting for population size, Cornell turns out to be the least-frequently mentioned Ivy, though other factors such as the impact of graduate programs and the percentage of alums that move to New York City are not accounted for.
It would be interesting to see whether or not the transition to co-education would have affected Dartmouth’s numbers, but unfortunately the database does not go all the way back to the early 1970’s when the College first began admitting women. Still, the website continues to expose interesting patterns and trends in effort to answer the somewhat-harsh question its creators posed: What do the world’s most self-important people think is important? Perhaps surprisingly, the tendencies of successful people to proudly announce their status as Ivy graduates has gone down since the early 2000’s, suggesting that status isn’t always what it seems as the world evolves.