On The Level
I’ve found another fun way to waste your time: a website that ranks the “education level” of your favorite blogs.
I should warn you that I have absolutely no idea how the rankings are determined. Perhaps the algorithm is based upon complexity of sentence structure (such as, for example, the use of parenthetical clauses); maybe it looks for indicators such as proper compound-adjective hyphenation, occurrences of sesquipedalian words, or usage of words, once common, that have now fallen into desuetude.
On the other hand, I suppose that it may make note of, say, a writer’s aptitude for alliteration, familiarity with classical languages, or other such artes perditae, and it could even, for all that, be using some sort of statistical-semantics analysis, or word-sense-disambiguation — perhaps some form of Tikhonov regularization, like a support-vector machine — to evaluate the writer’s grasp of advanced technical material.1
I guess the fact is I don’t know what the heck it’s doing. Have a look for yourself here.
- Another marker of academic writing that the software may take into consideration is the use of footnotes.
December 12th, 2007 at 3:22 am
I’m going to guess it uses something along the lines of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level ranking, which is the test used by MS Word to determine reading grade level. It’s actually a very simple formula that looks at words per sentence and syllables per word (there’s more info at Wikipedia). The algorithms you describe seem rather unrealistic–something that a human might be able to do, but I don’t think we’re at the point yet where a web-based application can make such complex calculations and judgments.
Or maybe not. Whatever it does use, it’s apparently not the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. I ran this post through and it came out as “college (postgrad),” then I ran my current post (on my site) through and it came out as “high school.” Yet our respective Flesh-Kincaid Grade Levels are 9.8 for you and 10.3 for me. But it’s got to be something simple, judging by the speed at which it works.
(By the way, I was amused at how you hedged your bets in the post. Very clever.)
December 12th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Hi Charles,
Thanks. I’d never heard of the Flesch-Kincaid ranking, and was (obviously) just goofing off here.
Every evening, after what is usually a pretty long day at work, I have to weigh spending several hours writing a serious post against dashing off some worthless frippery, and last night I was just too worn out to make any substantial effort.
I greatly enjoyed this recent post over at your place, by the way.
December 13th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Perhaps if you weren’t goofing off, this item plus its replies would have ranked higher than “Junior High School” level. I don’t suppose you’ll be proudly displaying the rating graphic. :-)
Yikes!
- M
December 13th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Hi Mike,
Well, I ran the same check right after I published it, and before the comments appeared:
“College (post-grad).”
I’m not quite sure what to say about that.
December 14th, 2007 at 2:19 am
I can vouch for what Malcolm said–before I posted my comment, it was college (postgrad). Wait a minute…
*quietly slips away*
(I’m glad you enjoyed my recent babblings, by the way. Kevin noted that the title was worthy of waka waka waka, which I took as a great compliment.)
December 14th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I did indeed, Charles. And I’ll take Kevin’s remark as a compliment also.
December 14th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
My blog scored “Junior High School” at first. A couple posts later, it scored “High School.” Both ratings are much too generous, in my opinion.
When I fed in the URL for the Paglia post I had written, the site gave me (or more likely Paglia, who is extensively quoted in that post) a “Genius” rating. Go figure.
Kevin
December 15th, 2007 at 1:17 am
Kevin, I don’t think the algorithm yet exists that could properly quantify your blog.