Redneck Engineering, A Modern Day Marvel
Introduction
r/RedneckEngineering is one of the fastest growing subreddits of the year 2023 with over 775k members. This subreddit showcases homemade inventions and innovations by individuals who are either looking to save a quick buck, or are in fact quite handy. Typically, rednecks and reddit are not often used in the same sentance unless someone were to say “Rednecks dont use Reddit”. This subreddit however, is an anomaly. Redditors, Engineers, and self proclaimed rednecks all interact cohesively to from this cultural conglomerate.
Given the variety of backgrounds and lifestyles of individuals who use this subreddit, we have decided to plot and analyze the top 20 most frequently used words on r/RedneckEngineering. The goal of this is to not only gain an insight as to what language these alleged engineers use when discussing their innovations, but to get a deeper look at some ideas or conversation topics that may not be obvious at a first glance.
Data
The data used for this analysis was collected from r/RedneckEngineering via the Reddit API. Luckily for our programmers, there was no cleaning that was necessary in order to conduct this analysis. The top 20 most frequently used words in the subreddit were subsequently plotted as nodes with each node representing a popular word and each node representing the amount of times two nodes have been seen in sequence to one another. The importance of each node is displayed representative of their size, with larger nodes appearing more often. NetworkX was used to create the visualization below.
Findings
Our network visualization has showed us that certain words such as yup, plastic, and pass are often used but not in conjunction with any other words which appear. most of our nodes are connected to eachother which gives us the impression that some of these words are in the top 20 just due to their connection to other frequently used words such as economy. Three important nodes that we will discuss are economy, toilet, and paper.
Toilet is a frequently used word on this subreddit, likely due to the reason that many people have toilet issues and hiring a plumber is expensive. Paper is connected to toilet likely due to the phrase “toilet paper” as well as the word “economy”. While an astute observation and an opinion not limited to any particular demographic, it does seem fitting that “rednecks” use the word toilet when discussing the current state of the economy.
Limitations
Our research is limited by a wide variety of conditions, the first of which being that there is no count for how many times each node appears in r/RedneckEngineering. While our nodes are programmed to differ in size based on their frequency, it appears that it either didnt work or that every node appears a very similar amount of times. The former is the most likey option.
The results of this analysis may hold some bias due to the fact that we are only pulling from the “Top” posts of this subreddit. Based on our audience and what they decide to upvote, some words that appear much more often than others could be hidden due to certain posts having low popularity.
The link to the repository used can be found here.
