SECRET STORYTELLING
What's it all about?
Much can be learned from PostSecret, the anonymous secret sharing website that posts every Sunday morning. There are two levels of story analysis played out in this project. The first is analysis of the storytelling power of a postcard. The second is the storytelling power of data on a website. The latter is more interesting than it sounds because it helps to convey the former. By adjusting certain settings, making certain arrangements and allowing for certain functions of the website, it is easier to see the similarities and differences in the anonymous responses to the postcards. Different sorting features of the website tell different stories about the data. The initial and most obvious way of sorting is by postcard. Each postcard corresponds to a genre (more on those later) and a series of comments. There was only enough time to gather and record six responses on the site – less than hoped for, but data input ended up taking a lot longer than initially planned, especially because of how all of the data is linked. Clicking on a postcard title (assigned by me, and usually just by using one identifying word or set of words from the card text) from the scroll menu on the right will reveal a postcard and its corresponding comments. Responses were not obligatory, so there are a few where individual respondents chose not to respond. By sorting in this fashion we can see what kinds of responses exist. Each postcard and each comment has been assigned a genre (the genres are far from perfect and in an attempt to make the items group well, several general categories were chosen for genres instead of specific descriptors, but they still give a general sense of the response.) Thus, we can compare the genre of the card with the genre of the response and the amount of responses of each type to see what kinds of stories are inspired. Additionally, we can look at the content of the responses themselves to see how directly correlated they are to the content of the postcard. Some responses are direct comments on the postcard, as seen on “Bear,” where several respondents directly addressed the postcard writer about his or her secret. Others are tangential – the relationship is there but not as obvious, like the response to “Bear” about Person F’s pillow, his or her equivalent to the post card writer’s stuffed bear. We can also sort by genre with the second scroll bar box on the right. We can see how many of each type of response and card are present before even sorting. Then, we can pick various response types or card types to look for further trends. We can look to see if the most “joke” responses were in response to “funny” post cards, or maybe to the sad ones to ease tension. We can also look to see how various trends on similar genre postcards stack up. Finally, we can sort by person. In sorting this way, we can learn a lot about the person his-or her-self and gain a sense of their basic traits by how they respond to the cards. We can understand how they typically responded to questions, how they compare to other respondents, and how they compare across the postcards. Do they like to tell stories or crack jokes? Make personal comments or sweeping statements? Share emotion or remain reserved? All of the answers to these questions can find their beginnings in an analysis using this feature. <br> Just going through the site for a bit, it’s easy to see some common trends. There was never a typical response for a post card - each one would have responses spanning several genres. Some people responded in mostly the same fashion (Person A and Person D) while others had varied responses based on the card. Two people abstained from responding to “Eighth Grade” and one abstained from “Actor.” Interestingly enough, the responses to one of them also had extreme similarity in content of responses. For “Actor,” four of the five responses referenced jealousy in different ways. There’s a “Joke” response on almost every card, but a “Quote” response on only one. Countless other conclusions can be drawn from reading the data in various ways and sorting it with myriad features. Especially if more responses were added, the possibilities for comparison of data and stories could be unending.
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Co-winners:
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?