Trends Since 2003
Carls on Substances tracks the frequency of substances discussed throughout 20+ years at Carleton. Due to Carleton not being a dry campus, substances have always been a popular topic of discussion throughout the years. While these conversations have had a comedic tone, the CLAP may be inadvertently destigmatizing discussions around drug and alcohol use. This chart may not catch everything, but it offers a broad glimpse of what substances are of popular interest.
When observing these terms through Voyant, we found that prior to 2015 (when gay marriage became legalized), LGBT topics came up in serious contexts, with students addressing issues they were experiencing as minorities at Carleton. Some topics that caught our attention were complaints about the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms at Carleton for trans students, gay marriage (before it was legalized), and some students being afraid to express their sexualities openly. Evidently, the CLAP was a way for queer and trans students to have a safe space where they could speak up about important issues. However, after 2015, the context shifted from serious conversation to jokes. Perhaps this is correlated to Carleton becoming a more diverse and open community.
After 2014, racial topics tend to be written about in a joking context similar to the LGBT graph. The switch from addressing issues regarding discrimination and bias against racial minorities to these issues no longer being addressed could be due to the CLAP no longer being a place where students write about serious topics. But rather, it is a magazine that is known and loved for not taking itself too seriously.
Rape and sexual assault (SA) mentions in the CLAP have had an interesting lifespan. During the very early days of the publication, there were occasionally complaints and problems with how SA was treated as a joke. (These articles do not appear in this visualization because they often used euphemisms or circuitous language to refer to SA or rape.) However, as time went on, more people used the CLAP as a way to spread awareness about SA and rape on campus in a serious manner. There were multiple instances where students named their assaulters and rapists publicly, taking advantage of the CLAP’s reputation for being anti-censorship. This trend peaked around the #MeToo era. In recent years, as the CLAP’s tone has become more unshakably comedic, mentions of SA and rape have largely fallen out of print.
Trends Since 2021
We decided to analyze trends in housing terms for the past 4 years to get a uniquely post-pandemic perspective. Some dorms at the top of the list, like Watson and Musser, are known for being particularly disgusting and are often referred to in a humorous way. Since Burton does double duty as a dining hall, its mentions may overlap, and James mentions sometimes overlap with the given name. The prevalence of “house” mentions might be explained by CLAP’s popularity among upperclassmen and the fact that most large parties on campus are thrown in houses rather than dorms. At the bottom of the list are Davis and Sevy: although they are upperclassmen-heavy dorms, they lack strong individual identities, likely in part because they are part of an interconnected group of buildings known as the Complex.
Trends in the 2024-2025 School Year
When exploring CLAPs from this year, I wanted to delve into the comedic nature of the CLAP. Hence, the creation of Carls vs. Commitment which tracks the frequency of intimate relationships at Carleton. I discovered that the CLAP does not tend to talk about relationships or dating, with terms like sex and nut taking precedence. It is also worth mentioning that the spikes in sex and nut occur in correspondence with Parents’ Weekend and Date Knight (a blind date event) respectively.