Chinese Restaurant Names as Journalism
April 19, 2016
I read an article in Jeff Bezos’ newspaper. The title was “We Analyzed the Names of Almost Every Chinese Restaurant in America. This Is What We Learned.” The almost is a nifty way of slip sliding around the sampling method which used restaurants listed in Yelp. Close enough for “real” journalism.
Using the notion of a frequency count, the write up revealed:
- The word appearing most frequently in the names of the sample was “restaurant.”
- The words “China” and “Chinese” appear in about 15,000 of the sample’s restaurant names
- “Express” is a popular word, not far ahead of “panda”.
The word list and their frequencies were used to generate a word cloud:
To answer the question where Chinese food is most popular in the US, the intrepid data wranglers at Jeff Bezos’ newspaper output a map:
Amazing. I wonder if law enforcement and intelligence entities know that one can map data to discover things like the fact that the word “restaurant” is the most used word in a restaurant’s name.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2016
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Chinese Restaurant Names as Journalism : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search