Tuesday, May 27, 2008

ACADEMAGIC: what do blog commenters miss most about old new york?

The problem began with the following question: what do you miss most about old New York? The New York Times City Room blog asked the provocative question on its blog last week, resulting in a flurry of nostalgic answers (478 comments as of May 27th). The question is near and dear to many a New Yorker's heart, but ultimately I didn't have the patience to sift through a lot of the ramblings because ultimately I have about as much attention span for blog comments as I do for The Jerry Springer Show, which is to say not much (or so I thought).


So, I approached Tyler about an idea I had, which was a website that would be able to create tag clouds from any source text. Tag clouds, if you are unfamiliar with them, are aggregations of word counts in a given text, where each word is resized according to its frequency. They are commonly found on blogs to denote word frequency, or on social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us (coincidentally, isn't it weird that del.icio.us doesn't own the domain http://www.icio.us/?). Tyler, being the guru that he is, promptly replied with tagcrowd.com, which is effectively the concept I had envisioned, albeit with much better execution.


Promptly, I took this new found information and plugged in my source text, and below was the result:

(Click on the image for a larger view)


Initially, I was totally befuddled by the apparent fondness that people had held for the old 23rd Street, until I realized that the blog posting was originally dated May 23rd, thus illuminating one of the limitations of using unfiltered tag clouds. Nevertheless, I'm intrigued by tag clouds as an analytical tool, albeit one that has to be used with a grain of salt.


As I learn more about the semantic web from Tyler, it's easy to see the difficulties and challenges we face in harnessing this information in a way that is useful and meaningful. It still takes a human mind to connect the fact that New Yorkers miss the West Village about as much as they miss the graffiti-filled subways of yore and old Times Square, but then again, there's no way of determining whether people were mentioning these examples as things that had gotten better or over time without reading through each of the entries.


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On a personal note, I have to say that I was a little disappointed by the lack of real surprises in this tag cloud, but maybe that is an argument in favor of finding the devil in the details. After all, I'd be more than a little shocked to find that people miss the old children's museum in the 50's on the West Side as much as I do, to say nothing of the days when Patsy Grimaldi still played Sinatra records at Grimaldi's Pizzeria and the wait was less than 45 minutes, or the fact that my parents and I were able to live on 37th Street and 8th avenue for less than it would cost to live in the South Bronx today. "Affordability" was a general term bandied about quite a bit, but it's vague enough that it's hard to fully grasp what it means. Then there were the trips to Fire Island as a kid...


Another issue is people's definitions of "old New York" seem to vary enough that there is no real concrete understanding of what it means. I find myself missing things about New York that I wasn't even alive to see, like Ebbets Field, the jazz age or the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, Woody Allen's upper east side, Coltrane or Bill Evans at the Vanguard (for God's sake you can hear the clinking of glasses in the background on those recordings), and I could go on and on. But these span the entire 20th century in New York, without even mentioning the days of the elevated train or horse-drawn carriages and farmland in Queens and uptown Manhattan.


I guess there is a lot to miss, but there is just as much to cherish now. New York is still the same cavernous mess I grew up in, constricted by a grid system it is just waiting to bust out of, to paraphrase Timothy "Speed" Levitch. I can't wait to spend my evenings cruising Broadway in the village at 1am, long past the hours when the tourists have bought their trinkets and the beautiful have retired their lofts to look up from the bottom of our little grand canyon and remember that nothing has really changed.

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UPDATE: Here's the actual text from the tag cloud:



created at TagCrowd.com


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