Kieran Healy
2 min readApr 27, 2015

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For added perfection, you could cluster that last figure.

Nice, but it’s hard to interpret … I think the Drudge Report ratios are dragging things out of whack. Too close to zero on penises and vagina, too close to one on conservative to liberal. I like the results with the scaled search data (not their ratios) better:

Now Wikipedia is skewing things, as is Tumblr’s high density of penises, vaginas, fellatio, and cunnilingus. But it’s interesting to see that FB pro-life score, and how different kinds of news media outlets cluster together. Note Buzzfeed scores well on cats.

Here’s a second scaled one with Wikipedia and Tumblr removed, so you see a tiny bit more detail on some of the other sites. (Note the clustering here is different because we removed the two sites.)

Buzzfeed still strong on cats, Jezebel on cunnilingus (and vagina). And Facebook again v. strong on pro-life.

You kind of have to be careful with cluster analysis — a sociologist I know likes to say it resembles Afghanistan, in that you know how to get in but not how to get out. On the other hand this really makes it the ideal method for speculative hot takes.

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