Work is keeping me busy, so there haven’t been many blog posts recently. To prove that I’m still alive here’s just a quick add-on to my first blog post in my Pencil Blog Series.
Let’s have a quick look at the word count [1]I guess it’s not always clear what counts as a word and what doesn’t, so your word count might vary. of Pencil Revolution blog posts over time.
Word Count
The longest Pencil Revolution blog post had nearly 2500 words. The shortest blog posts didn’t have any words and just consisted of a picture.
Let’s have a look at the word count plot. The x-axis (horizontal axis) is used for the dates of the blog posts. The y-axis (vertical axis) is for the word counts of the blog posts.
Each dot represents a blog post. Early posts are on the left, recent posts are on the right. Short posts are near the bottom, long posts are higher up.
The black line is a straight linear regression line. The blue curve is a LOESS (local regression) curve, which is a bit more ‘flexible’ than the straight line. You can see that in the first years, posts got longer and longer, while in recent years posts got shorter and shorter.
Cumulative Word Count
Looking at the cumulative word count we see that all Pencil Revolution blog posts together reached a word count of nearly 170,000 by now.
In this chart, the solid line shows the number of cumulative blog posts, as seen in the previous blog post, while the dotted line shows the cumulative word count. The average word count per post is 266, both lines are aligned accordingly. You can see that up to 2011 the posts were longer than the current word count average, while the posts since 2016 have been shorter than the current word count average.
That’s it for now like I said – just a quick blog post to show I’m still here. I hope to post more once work is less busy.
References
| ↑1 | I guess it’s not always clear what counts as a word and what doesn’t, so your word count might vary. |
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I’m trying to imagine how you get word count for all those hundreds of blog posts.
Hi Kiwi-d, unless you object your blog will be added soon. It’s just a bit more messy with your blog, because some blog posts don’t display the date, e.g. Freds Pencils (you can see it if you visit the June 2011 archive).
I haven’t verified it yet, but I think you have 544 blog posts (posts only, so excluding pages, like the sell / swap pages) so far with a total word count of 249,502. Wow, such a high word count!!
To answer your question: I used a similar way of doing it as in my 2015 blog post about scraping pencils. After that, because I want to analyse the blog posts anyway, I converted everything to a Document-term matrix and took the word count through the matrix.