Evaluation
After training my model with Word2Vec, I used a couple of tools to evaluate the corpus. The main tool that I used was Closest To. This function specifically allowed me to input a specific word and find all words that are associated with it. For example, if given the word “magic,” the three closest association are “magical,” “spells,” and “power.” (as shown to the left) Using this tool, I chose to focus on a few popular items that often occur to see how the user base portrays them. I have chosen to showcase specifically Bob Ross, Star Wars, and the movie Infinity Wars. Bob Ross is beloved by the Reddit community as a whole, and associations to him will reveal what specializations that r/WritingPrompts assigns him. Star Wars has many subreddits which are themed to it, specifically r/PrequelMemes and r/Sequel memes, and looking at how those subreddits leak into r/WritingPrompts will reveal cross culture influence well. Finally looking at Infinity Wars will show how popular culture influences the subreddit months after the movie originally came out.
Starting with Bob Ross, there is a Know Your Meme page on him, signifying his status as a meme. This page can be found here. With Reddit as a whole, he is associated with love, acceptance, and happiness. Using the Closest To tool I found the closest associations to the word “ross” to be “Hope”, “You”, and “Ken”. The first two associations are things that I expected, but “ken” I did not. This association probably came from a specific post where one of the characters names was Ken. This may just be a fault of Word2Vec, or it might be because of a specific writing prompt that was very popular and had many submissions. It should also be noted that the word “cunt” appears on the list of words, though even with some manual digging into the subreddit I could not find where the correlation may have appeared. Taking these associations into account, I find that even with other common memes that all of the themes are the same as every other subreddit. There wasn’t much personalization in terms of how Bob Ross is viewed, but there are some interesting associations in terms of what he is doing. I choose to search what terms came up when I searched for “Ross” and “Fight” together. Word2Vec came up with the terms “Savior”, “Lord”, and “Disrespect”. I can only assume that the phrase “Our Lord and Savior Bob Ross” came up somewhere in the corpus. I manually searched for this on Reddit and came up with a prompt about the four horsemen of the apocalypse fighting Bob Ross, Jim Henson, Steve Erwin, and Mr. Rogers.
Moving on to popular culture, I choose to look at the impact that the movie Infinity Wars had on the subreddit. Starting off with a search for the term Thanos, one of the closest associations to it is Batman. This is an interesting comparison that was made because Thanos is the villain in the movie, with the goal of killing off half of all life everywhere. The fact that one of the closest associations to him is a hero is somewhat surprising. I looked into this by doing some manual digging and found that there are two other subreddits dedicated to the movie, R/thanosdidnothingwrong, and R/inthesoulstone. Both of these subreddits actual treat Thanos as a hero for bringing “balance” to the universe and allowing the remaining humans to flourish. This mentality seems to have seeped into R/WritingPrompts and has definitely influenced the perception of him. Other terms that are associated with Thanos are “wins”, “Spiderman”, and “Deadpool”. I believe the Spiderman and deadpool similarities come from the superhero association, but they are both still heros and there are no relations to comic villains as I would have expected. Another query I chose was using the words “soul” and “stone” together. The only results I found from those was negative associations with words such as “darkness”, “temple”, and “bones”. Temple is the only association that really piqued my interest but I again couldn’t find where the association came from.