Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur

The graffiti preserved in Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius provided unique insights into Roman street life. The Mayan graffiti found in Tekal and the graffiti left by Vikings also give us small glimpses into the past. What kind of insight might a longitudinal study of the graffiti on the walls at the University of Chicago’s main library provide into the lives and minds of this community of college students?

Since September 27, 2007, I have been documenting the graffiti left in public study areas in the Joseph Regenstein Library ("the Reg"): the study nooks tucked into the stacks, the whiteboards in the all-night study space, and the study carrels in the reading rooms. I have transcribed over 620 “pieces” of graffiti—many of which contain more than one single contribution—and over 410 of them are datable to within a week of their creation. The following is an analysis of the data to date; you can access the entire data set at my website, Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur.

Happiness
One possible metric for measuring happiness is the classic “smiley face” and its negative counterpart, the “frowny face”. On these grounds, students lean markedly towards happiness, with over 63% smiley faces. (See fig. 1.) A superficial look at the textual data suggests an even stronger case for an assessment of happiness, with 10 occurrences of “happy” vs. 3 occurrences of “sad”.

This must be tempered by the fact that 70% of the uses of the word “happy” are in the phrase “be happy”—suggesting happiness is a currently-unrealized state. Subsequent points of analysis also raise doubts about the possibility of an unqualified assertion of happiness.

Love vs. Hate
Love and hate, both classic graffiti themes, appear often in the Reg. The difference in their frequency once again suggests that U of C students do more loving than hating: “love” (or a heart-shaped drawing used in lieu of the verb) appears almost 6 times as often as “hate”.

The objects of student love vary widely, with “Puerto Rico,” “this silence,” “Tiramisu,” and other miscellanea appearing alongside the usual references to people, school, and life in general.

Hatred, in contrast, is directed exclusively towards people, academic subjects, finals week, and oneself. The feelings of the student body are not always unanimous, as a number of items appear as the object of both love and hate. (See fig. 2.)

Sex
“Fuck” is one of the most frequently used words in the corpus of graffiti. “Suck” and “ass(hole)” are also well-represented. However, a close examination of context shows that the sexual usage of these terms amounts to a mere 19% for fuck, 22% for suck, and 20% for ass(hole).

“Suck” is overwhelmingly used as a synonym for “bad," whereas the non-sexual meanings of “fuck” include use as an intensifier—“fucking,” “the fuck”—a dismissive phrase—“fuck this place”—indicating trouble ("fucked", “fucked up"), and as a generic synonym for person: “keep it up, you lonely fuck.” In addition to the common use of “ass(hole)” as a derogatory term for others, “ass” is found almost as frequently as an intensifier (“ugly-ass” and in idioms referring to heads/sticks up one’s ass. (See fig. 3.)

Even an examination of the word “sex” yields mixed results. Out of four pieces of graffiti that use the word, only “sex in the morning, sex all day!!!” is clearly very sexual; less clear are a suggestion that one use condoms for safe sex, the phrase “for sex in the stacks, look up” (with nothing there to be seen) and the philosophical question “Is sex with a zombie necrophilia?”

Anatomy
Penises overwhelmingly dominate in both pictorial and textual representations of anatomy. There are no drawings of vaginas whatsoever, and only 5 drawings of breasts compared to 9 drawings of penises (See fig. 4.) Textually, there are four references to female anatomy (predominately rendered as “boobs.” In contrast, there are 17 penis references, mostly split between “penis” and “dick,” with two uses of “cock” and one of “dong.”

Temporal fluctuations
The prevalence of graffiti referring to love, despair, and sex varies depending on the time of year, in rather surprising ways. Love peaks in October—right as the school year starts—and remains at that high level through November, when despair also peaks (around the time of fall quarter midterms). After November, both love and despair graffiti drop off significantly until spring. Love peaks again in April (beginning of spring quarter) before falling off in May, when despair has its second peak.

Entirely separate from love graffiti, sex graffiti reaches its one and only peak in December, before declining for the rest of the school year. (See fig. 5.) Perhaps students also “get lucky” in the summer— but if so, the luckiest part is that they’re not in the library to write about it.