Ghostly Jargon in Haunted Spots: A Gendered Perspective

Looking at the dataset for haunted places in USA as a part of Tidy Tuesday (Oct 10, 2023)

In the eerie realm of American haunts, male spirits outnumber female in most locales. Yet, within the sinister confines of academia, the scales tip towards women. A spine-chilling revelation! See Figure 1

Figure 1: Percentage of haunted locations with gender-specific terms in descriptions

Ghostly Jargon in Haunted Spots: A Gendered Perspective

Figure 2 illustrates the prevalence of gender-specific common words in haunted locations, comparing all American locations to haunted spots in universities and colleges.

Figure 2: Gender-specific words’ prevalence in haunted locations, comparing sites across USA with those in universities and colleges.

Credits: Sentiment Analysis (Mohammad and Turney 2012) and code inspiration from Steven Ponce’s R script on GitHub.

Unique Verbiage in these haunted places

In contrast to the previous slide’s word clouds featuring overlapping terms, the Figure 3 shows distinct vocabulary found exclusively in male and female haunted locations.

Figure 3: Unique words in descriptions of gender-specific haunted locations, but absent in descriptions of the opposite gender’s haunted places.

Carefully look at All Haunted Places citing males: Who knew America’s haunted places had such a penchant for “wife” – even beyond the grave! Ghostly husbands, you’ve got some explaining to do! 😄👻

References

Mohammad, Saif M., and Peter D. Turney. 2012. “CROWDSOURCING A WORDEMOTION ASSOCIATION LEXICON.” Computational Intelligence 29 (3): 436–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8640.2012.00460.x.