Make it Simple, but Significant.
I usually talk about my development process for putting out the website with my namesake (fredlambuth.com). I talk about that process on LinkedIn because developing/deploying/hosting a web app is related to what I have done professionally over the past few jobs. This time it is a little more on the nose. I had a ‘business question’ that I wanted answered, so I did all the steps required to find an answer. That question was, ‘What were the words most spoken by each main character on the TV series Mad Men?’
The mantra of ‘managed expectations’ for this project was formed shortly after I began trying to answer that question. I could not find complete transcripts for all episodes with names indicating who was saying what line. The best I could find on one website was all the lines spoken on each episode with no indication of who was pronouncing them. From what I could see in the data, I could either ask “What are the most frequently used words per season?” or “which characters’ name is mentioned most frequently?” I went with the latter. This decision was made after looking at the quality of the actual transcripts. It reeked of hours of data cleaning, breaking the sense of proportion I had for looking up word count data in Mad Men transcripts.
To answer the question of which character is mentioned most, I figured a line plot across the seasons would best make the picture that demonstrates which character was being talked about the most and why. I dropped Don Draper out of the list despite him being the protagonist. His name(s) appear over twice as much as the second-place holder each season, and rather consistently with an average of 180 name drops per season. Don being the most spoken about character among the cast does not require hours of data bending and charts to be revealed.
Among the remaining cast, we see Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson trading for the number two spot most seasons. Betty Draper started strong when she was Don's wife, but tapered off throughout the remaining seasons. Joan has a moment in the top spot in the season where she is the object of many conversations among the firm's partners seeking the Jaguar account. Roger Sterling’s number may be inflated because I included his last name in my search parameters, even though the company that is the setting throughout the series bears his name.
‘When a man gets to the point when his name's on the building, he can get an unnatural sense of entitlement.’
I thought it would be delightfully ironic to include those mentions of his last name, since Roger always worried that he was a kid assuming his dad’s name. I also thought to include Dick Whitman as a character, but he gets so few mentions, his name would be a line hugging the bottom.
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I also included the mentions of beer, wine, spirits as its own character. Despite alcohol being on camera for most of the show, it is only mentioned sparsely until the last season when Don’s alcoholism outshines his creative charm, causing a need for his colleagues to address it. The dataset being just the spoken dialogue is a meta characteristic for analyzing what insights it can offer. The data is what is spoken out loud, so this data is a reflection of what the characters want to say or are expected to say, rather than what is actually transpiring. Liquor and cigarettes in the workplace were an unspoken reality in 1960s Manhattan.
This question of mine was spurred by my most recent rewatching of the series, and from my impressions at this new position for a consultancy company. The vocabulary so far at this role can sound remarkably like the words thrown around on Mad Men. Most of my professional career has been in the military, the federal government and one jaunt in banking at a bank so old and enormous it gave me the same sensation as working for the government. I like the idea of being part of a small nimble and creative agency working with titans of industry. That sounds cool to say I work at a Sterling-Cooper type firm. I hope to be come out like Ken Cosgrove, rather than the brilliant yet utterly pathetic Don. Bert Cooper has traces of being a good role model because of his tacit wisdom, despite his overt adulation for Ayn Rand.
I published the full chart over on my website. I will get around to cleaning the data more so I can find the most frequently used words per season. I know from my preliminary work that Nixon is going to be the top word for the first season.
P.S. This article's title is Don Draper's drink order in 'Waldorf Stories'.