Confessions of a Stats Geek
I never would have thought I'd write a post with this title. In my scholarship, I tend to veer toward qualitative cultural analysis. I avoid numbers whenever possible. Though I'm a big fan of maps, I detest charts-- they take forever to make and half your readers won't even give them a glance.
That said, I'm addicted to reading my web statistics, monitoring my online presence. I'm obsessive about it. Every night, I check my flickr stats, go to Google Analytics to track how this page is doing, and since joining Yelp last month, I've begun checking that almost daily, to see how many page views my profile's gotten, and how my reviews have been rated. Once a week, on Sunday evening, I go to last.fm to find out what music I've been listening to, and see what people with similar musical tastes might have uncovered that I haven't. I'm awash in statistics.
It's not that I do much with them. I mean, I'd definitely argue that these stats, along with frequent self-googling, keep me aware of who's seeing me online, and how. But that, to be completely honest, is a second-order perk.
The main reason I do it is... I don't know. It's visceral, it's almost a form of introspection. (Although it's outwardly-focused introspection...) The net, now that we're in the "Web 2.0" days, is an intensely performative medium. From the initial hypertextual concept of infinitely linked texts, we've moved on, to an internet that's all about the (multiple, contingent, intertextual) construction of the self. And stats let us know how we're constructing ourselves, to a certain extent. They're a mirror to our online identities, that allow us to do a bit of reader-response criticism on ourselves...
Because as much as we all know that it's "just the internet" and that "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog," as much as it's widely reiterated that online virtual personae are separate from actual identity, that's only half the truth. In a world where people spend as much time as many of us do in refining and crafting our identities online, these things get fuzzy. You invest your selfhood into these projects. The work of molding a performative identity can never be alienated labor. Which we all know-- that's why everyone gets into a tizzy when, say, LiveJournal changes hands again or Rupert Murdoch buys MySpace. Because when users switch from "people using a service" to "people creating content," there's an investment made, and a bit of your identity is intermingled with that of the platform you use.
When I migrated this blog from Typepad to my own WordPress blog last month, I was changing camps-- making an identity shift. And part of that identity shift involved having to find a way to track my stats. The stats provided by Typepad were quite good. Those provided by Google Analytics, however, are far richer.
...This entire post has been a protracted lead-up to this: given that it's been a month since I've migrated my blog, I decided to share some figures, here. Let's look at who's been reading, and how.
- So far, my numbers are down, but barely. My average number of pageviews per day has gone down from 7.5 to 6.7. I'm frankly surprised that the damage hasn't been worse, although since moving, I've been doing more things consciously to boost my google juice, like using trackback urls, pinging sites like Technocrati, and (simplest of all) posting more frequently.
- Here in the states, the majority of people who visit my sites seem to be in Northern Virginia, Southern California, and Texas. Besides Texas and one hit each from New Mexico and Kansas, I haven't had a single person visit my site from the area West of the Mississippi and east of the Pacific Coast States. Maybe I need to post more things of interest to the Plains States and Rocky Mountain Region.
- While the vast majority of people viewing my site are in the US, (with Aglophone nations like the UK, New Zealand, Ireland, and Canada filling in a large number of the other unique users) I've also, somewhat surprisingly, had hits from: Switzerland, the Netherlands, India, Romania, the Czech Republic, Spain, South Korea, and Malaysia.
- 70% of you are NOT using Internet Explorer. Good on ya! And most of you use Firefox. This makes me happy.
- Far and away, my most popular post this month has been my review of Tom Smith's site, "Let's Play Ukulele." At this rate, it'll quickly out pace my all-time most-viewed post, a mini-essay on the china and china cabinet in John Lewis Krimmel's "The Quilting Frolic". This has gotten me thinking. I'm shocked that an ukulele post generated such interest-- although the post also related to my notions of the potential uses of Web 2.0 technology for digital pedagogy, let's face it... Digital Pedagogy and Cultural History are pretty limited-interest topics. I wonder if expanding the scope of this blog would encourage readership by making a bigger umbrella, or discourage readers by being a bit scattershot. If everyone and their mother is now engaging in Friday Cat Blogging, I figure a semi-weekly ukulele post might not hurt me. And plus, it'd be fun, and my roommates are getting sick of hearing me talk about ukes.
Well, this may be just of interest to me, but it gave me some things to think about.
Now if someone could just explain my flickr stats to me: I understand why this picture of Barak Obama is my most popular:
But why on earth is this picture (of my roommate's friend Ron, when we went on a ski trip) my second-most popular?
Aparently a lot of people click on it when they do a Yahoo Image search for "jeans and blazer"...
Architectural Reconstruction Project– Preliminary
I'm trying to do an autobiographical final project, so I attempted to do a reconstruction of the house I grew up in.
Unfortunately, I didn't have any pictures of it, so I did most of the "construction" from memory. This led to a few problems when I flew in to Ohio last night and got a picture of the place:
I'd remembered the roof on the front of the house, over the front entryway, as being peaked, for example.
So last night I did a lot of erasing and fixing and correcting, and I'm reasonably happy with the results:
(I gotta say, I'm also quite impressed with Sketchup's ability to cast shadows fairly reasonably, too.)
Obviously, there's some problems. The dormer's kinda funky. The buttresses that hold up the roof-- which are a pretty defining part of the house's character, I left off, because I was having so much trouble with the roof's overhang... has anyone else gotten the "follow me" approach to roofs to work? 'Cause it worked in the video, but it ain't workin' for me. And that leads to another problem-- there's funky unnecessary lines everywhere, especially on the roof. And as my mother pointed out, the chimney's too short, and a bit too far to the front, which would be a fire hazard. So I guess it's good that I'm just doing this virtually...
Let's walk around to the back of the house, now...
I actually enjoyed this view-- it may not look like much, but if you wanted to have this view of the house when I was growing up, you'd have had to have stood in my neighbor's garage, and had the ability to see through walls. And he was an old man, a compulsive hoarder with about a million cats... So even if I could have seen through walls, I wouldn't have gone into his garage to get that view, 'cause he scared me.
Notice how the roof line gets strange in the back? When I was a small child, my parents built an addition on the back of the house. My mom had a serious illness in the middle of that, so there was about a year when I was small where the kitchen sink was a garden hose and a bucket. The wooden stairs out the back were there when I was small, but were later replaced when my father built a small porch.
There's some problems from this side, too. The addition is actually not clapboard like the rest of the house, but board-and-batten. I got lazy on that one, and decided to use the clapboard, because I didn't want to make a board-and-batten pattern.
Another problem is with the stovepipe for the wood stove that heats the addition-- it's crooked. I just noticed that a few minutes ago. I lined it up with the roof instead of making it parallel to the ground.
Again, the thing's awash with unnecessary lines.
Overall, I learned a lot about Sketchup, and it was kind of fascinating to first attempt to replicate the building by memory, and then try to make it look like a photograph. I mean, I know that building pretty intimately-- I scrubbed it every summer, and painted it more than once. But it's kind of amazing how hard it is to remember the fine details. This morning, my family and I have sat around critiquing my Sketchup work, each of us remembering different little details about the way the house was built.
Oh-- and finally, because technically the Sanborne Map thing, while it was by far the easiest part of the assignment, was integral to the assignment-- here's how my house, circa 1982, looks superimposed onto the map of the neighborhood from 1928.
Shockingly, there's only one other building on my block that's changed significantly other than the one I grew up in.
Incidentally, did anyone else find a way to get the Google Earth data to not come through to Sketchup in black and white? (Not the Sanborn stuff, the actually satellite images from GE...)