By Paul A. Djupe and The Oliver Gladfelter

Another year has passed, meaning OneTwentySeven will be turning two years old soon. OneTwentySeven was founded under a set of related goals: provide reliable information about the student body, contribute quantitative context to campus debates, and – perhaps above all – improve our understanding of the mini-society we call Denison.

In our first year (2016-17), we got on our feet by writing mostly about politics (in fact, we used the word ‘political’ 90 times, an average of 2.4 times per article). Topics such as voting and ideologies surfaced time and time again. This past year, we still covered politics, yet we also expanded and diversified our coverage to discuss a much broader range of campus topics.

Here are the ten words that popped up the most in each year’s articles (after removing so called ‘stop words’ like ‘and’, ‘the’, etc.).

So while we still wrote about politics, we also wrote about residence halls, religion, free speech, the Mitchell Center, campus migration, the effects of social media, gender equality, faculty mentorship, how campus spaces are used, binge drinking, student extracurricular involvement, the possibility of security cameras, and new campus parking policies – just to name a few.

And as our range of coverage grew, so did our presence. Growth was a big part of our story throughout the 2017-2018 school year, in terms of both breadth of coverage and readership.

Comparative Statistics (from the blog)

Content	2016-17	2017-18
Total page views	13,410	19,167
Total visitors	8,006	12,046
Best # of views for a month	2,618 (Nov)	4,121 (Sept)
Total posts published (70)	32	38

And here’s the top 7 honor roll! The only reason I’m up there 3 times is that I dropped everything to write those posts so that they were (incredibly) timely.

Post with highest # of views (Author)		Views
Which Major has the Most Pretentious Students? (Gladfelter)		1,299
Hate Speech vs. Free Speech at Denison (Djupe)		1,088
How did Denison Vote? (Djupe)		1,069
The Truth about the Sunnies (Zofchak)		1,052
United by Discrimination (Djupe)		830
One in Five (Meth)		818
Notorious Suites of East (Buehler)		690

All in all, OneTwentySeven had a successful year and is set to continue growing in Year Three.

I (Oliver) always took pride in the work we do: through research and reporting, we make the campus less susceptible to falsities, rumors, and myths – a feat particularly important in the age of fake news. I also have a lot to thank OneTwentySeven for – including an internship offer, an opportunity to practice public writing skills, and an excuse to ask the student body all sorts of funky and unusual questions and then to write stories about their answers!

I’ll just say that it was really a highlight of my (PAD) Denison career working with you (and Abby The Zof) to launch this thing and turn it into such a high impact project. It wouldn’t be nearly the same without your work, only in part because you’re responsible for more than a quarter of the posts! Thanks man. [solitary tear]

Who’s next?

If you’re interested in writing, reach out to Djupe!

Paul Djupe is a local cyclist who happens to have taught political science at Denison since the Harry Potter series was first published. You can learn more about his work at pauldjupe.com.

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