Hoping to get your wedding mentioned by the New York Times? The Rap Genius Engineering Team has produced a new Wedding Crunchers tool, “a searchable database of about 60,000 Times wedding announcements published between 1981 and 2013.”
You can mine the data, comparing the frequency of wedding announcements about different kinds of writers. As you can see by the chart embedded above, authors have the best chance of getting a wedding announcement, topping “writers,” “novelists,” “screenwriters” and “publishing.” Check it out:
The neat thing about these announcements is that they’re fairly structured—if you read a bunch of them, you’ll notice patterns in the way couples are introduced and how their basic “stats” are phrased. This makes it possible to rigorously test our intuitions about trends … WeddingCrunchers lets you measure the frequency of specific words and phrases in these announcements. When you search for a phrase (technically called an n-gram), you get back a graph displaying how usage of that phrase fluctuated over time.