Text Message Analysis

January 18th, 2007

This is one of these really random posts I make which don’t really have much point, but I find pretty interesting anyway.

I decided to do a little text analysis on the text messages I’ve sent in the last 10 days using MyPhoneExplorer (for Sony Ericsson phones) and Textalyser to analyse the content of the texts.

I don’t even know why I bothered to do this… I’m either really bored or I just wanted a better way to revise statistics than doing past papers…

Summary 

In the last 10 days:

  • Sent 67 texts to 12 people
  • 4,893 characters (2,911 excluding spaces)
  • 564 words
  • 365 different words

Top Words

  1. lol (21 times)
  2. just (10 times)
  3. now (8 times)
  4. tho (7 times)
  5. cant (7 times)
  6. think (5 times)
  7. cat (5 times)
  8. might (5 times)
  9. really (5 times)
  10. here (5 times)

Excludes common words.

Blog Word Frequency

In July, I did a similar text analysis but on the contents of my blog entries. 

I’d love to do a similar analysis with the content of emails I write or messages I send on MSN. It’d be really interesting to see how our writing styles vary between different methods of communication. 

  1. Texting more expensive than Hubble Telescope
  2. Semantic Video Analysis
  3. Blog Word Frequency
  4. £5 of free credit for T-Mobile Pay As You Go
  5. Appearing Offline on MSN/Windows Live Messenger: Game Theory Analysis

6 Responses to “Text Message Analysis”

  1. # Xeenon 18 Jan 2007 at 9:34 pm

    Logging MSN? Seems to me you’re using the default messenger - not that it’s bad or something (it sucks. hard), but there’re way better messengers out there.

    Well anyway, what I wanted to say is that there’s a stats plugin for Miranda IM that analyzes all kind of things… like time of the day byte/word/session count in/out word count per person and so on. Here is one of those plugins that can accomplish these tasks, although I believe there’s a newer, better one. http://addons.miranda-im.org/details.php?action=viewfile&id=646

    I’m not sure if Miranda can import MSN history, but once you switched you never go back. I just got so used to tabbed chatting. I’ll see if I can find the stats plugin I meant.

    xeen 

  2. # Devon Shawon 18 Jan 2007 at 9:35 pm

    I think you’ll find not only a general decrease in size of words, but the vernacular will be radically different too. It’s not so much the text-typing that makes the difference, it’s the standard 160-character limit per-text. Even with the slide-out keyboard on my PDA phone (a Verizon XV-6700) and the ability to span past 160 into 320, I find myself going back and restructuring my sentences to fit neatly within the first limit. You sort of develop a text shorthand over time, depending on the phone (and therefore style of input) that you use.

  3. # Noel - Mosioon 09 Apr 2007 at 7:09 am

    I have to say it’s pretty cool that your top texted word was "lol", you can’t ask for anything better than that. I agree, though, that analyzing the other communication forms, like email, could prove more interesting with a broad range of results. I’m afraid, though, analysis of our emails would result in more work buzz words and fewer laughs, but I guess that’s why they call it "work".

  4. # Sebastianon 04 Jul 2007 at 2:55 pm

    ur a loser! now why do that in your spare time? seriously get out more!!!

  5. # Kostenon 13 Sep 2007 at 1:44 pm

    I’m not sure if Miranda can import MSN history, but once you switched you never go back.

  6. # James Zetlandon 05 Feb 2008 at 7:00 pm

    I’ve always wanted to find out the significance of kisses people leave on txt messages. You know, the difference between males and females, how many they leave, whether it is an indication of mood, emotions, ideals, if you can tell if somebody likes you from txt kisses. I think it would be interesting research.

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