The Herald published its first edition on Wednesday Dec. 2, 1891. And while its mission of providing daily news to Brown remains, its writing style and the community it reports on has changed dramatically.
Using Optical Character Recognition, The Herald mapped the frequency of its words from its first edition in 1891 to mid-October 2024. Using our interactive platform, you can map, export and share graphs detailing how The Herald has evolved since 1891. To dive into the data, use The Herald’s interactive dashboard here.
The site includes words that have been mentioned over 100 times and multi-word phrases that have been used over 500 times.
Ratty vs Sharpe Refectory
Use of the term “Ratty” started to rise in the mid-60’s, over a decade after the first reference to the Sharpe Refectory in 1952. Calling Brown’s main dining hall “The Ratty” became commonplace among Brown students, even making its way into tours for prospective students. Use of the term “Ratty” rose until the 2000s, when Sharpe Refectory made a comeback in The Herald’s pages (The Herald’s in-house style guide today prefers Sharpe Refectory over Ratty).
Courtesy of The Brown Daily Herald's Data Desk
BDH vs The Herald
Though known by many across College Hill as the BDH, The Herald refers to itself as “The Herald” on all references. Some rare appearances of the BDH may be included on advertisements or stickers across campus, but use of The Herald vastly exceeds references to BDH in our print editions.
Explore more terms and campus trends — from the fall of “Brunonian” to the rise of computer science — here.
ABOUT:
The Herald Trends search engine has indexed every word to appear in The Herald print editions since 1891. The searchable terms are every word that has appeared 100 times or more, and every phrase of two, three or four words that has appeared 500 times or more.
The data in this project was scanned with optical character recognition from the Brown Digital Repository Archive of The Brown Daily Herald from 1891 to 2021. Most issues from 2021 and all from 2022 onward are from the Issuu online archive of The Herald. All of this year's editions are included up to October 11, 2024.
Content that appeared exclusively in the online edition of The Herald is not included and certain years have missing data.
If you find any particularly interesting graphs or trends, feel free to share them with caleb.ellenberg@gmail.com. Happy searching!
Herald Trends was led by Caleb Ellenberg ’28 for The Brown Daily Herald Data Desk. Additional analysis was performed by Aung Swan Oo ’28.
