|
|||||
|
As discussed in Poemetrics, Part 1, we may be able to gain a lot of insight into what readers like about poetry by analyzing it statistically. The 128 poems written during MMPoetry gave us a small sample of data with which to play. Without further delay, I’d like to present my quick-and-dirty results. Under each question, I’ll show the “win-loss record” for poems tagged with each attribute, and discuss any interesting variances that are revealed. Poetry and other works of art are famously open to opinion and interpretation. What I describe as poignant, you may declare repugnant. What I feel is hackneyed, you may find hilarious. What I cast off as atrocious, you may consider genius. We can continue that dance all day and night, but neither of us will ever prove ourselves “right”. At least not until one of us brings some data. Madness! 2012 has arrived at the Final Four. Round 5 will feature two poetry pairings:
Their words have now been assigned, and they now have 36 hours to come up with what will be their fifth poem of the tournament. If you’re wondering why there are no numbers next to their words, it is because their respective “seeds” are now ignored for the Final Four and Finals. Instead, the word prompts were decided by a process that included all 60 poets who were previously eliminated from the tournament in earlier rounds. The poets eliminated in Rounds 1-2 suggested a total of 80 words for consideration by the poets eliminated in Round 3. In turn, each of these poets picked their favorites, and passed the aggregate top 12 to the poets just eliminated in Round 4. These poets then had the privilege and responsibility to assign the word to the poet who beat them to reach the Final Four. (Fun, don’t you think?) Check out the matchups and leave a comment with your thoughts on these latest word prompts. Now, some miscellany. By all accounts, Madness! 2012 has been a success so far. Thank you all for making it so! Now it’s time to kick it up a notch. In Round 1, we averaged 154 votes per poetry pairing. Not bad! But I think that we can collectively do an even better job of getting these great poems in front of more teachers, parents, and kids. “How?” you ask? (Cool — I can make you ask anything I want just by typing it!)
The above chart overlays vote count with the number of Facebook shares and tweets that I recorded for each matchup post. The correlation screams out at you. SHARING = VOTES. Look at that matchup between Greg Pincus and Dave Crawley (4-wired vs. 13-falsetto). It was shared on Facebook 186 times and tweeted 29 times, and as a result had far and away the highest vote total of Round 1, with 449 votes. The story is the same elsewhere. To better understand the exact relationship, I ran a few variables (# facebook shares, # tweets, and poll end time) through a simple linear regression model to see what popped out as drivers of higher vote totals: Poll end time proved an insignificant variable. Though more time would obviously equal more votes, it is not as significant as either Facebook shares or tweets. So I removed that, and ran the model with only Facebook shares and tweets. No contest — tweeting, while much appreciated(!), has no meaningful statistical effect when compared to Facebook. So … here is your mission, whether or not you wish to accept it: SHARE THE MADNESS ON FACEBOOK! Every time that you share a link to a Madness! 2012 poll on Facebook, it generates +2 votes for that poll. And that finding is significant at the 99.9999999999% level. The Round 2, Flight 1 polls that closed last night averaged 192 votes each, which is a 24% improvement over Round 1. That’s great, but I think there are more than 192 people in the world who love kids’ poetry … Don’t you? -Ed |
My name is Ed DeCaria. I look pretty much like this, depending on when I last got a haircut. I write poems for kids (in perfect meter and rhyme, almost every time). I still look up words in the dictionary. I write about baseball between innings. I'll be about 5 minutes late.
|
||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Think Kid, Think! - All Rights Reserved
|
|||||
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
