Boy Band Data

Finding data that might be interesting to students and will let you do some mathematical analysis is sometimes hard. But thanks to fivethirtyeight.com we have lots of examples. This one takes the lyrics of boy bands summarizes them. That is, what are the top 20 one, two, three and four word phrases. They have done the work of collecting the data and now we can make some graphs of it.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/90s-boy-band-lyrics-theyre-all-about-you/

The Analysis

Now they have done the work of collecting the data but I have transferred it all to a Google Sheet so that we can do some analysis. Because the data is a summary of discrete information then the appropriate graphs would be bar graphs. If you need to know how to make a bar graph with Google Sheets you can try this video.

Though this is not particularly rich data set, it is good for having students make bar graphs with technology and they can see if they can see any trends in phrases (maybe how the progression of na na's goes)

Sample Questions

• Which phrases continue as the number of words increase?
• Which phrases make sense in being in the top 20?
• How does the count of each phrase change as the number of words increases?
• Write some sample lyrics in a possible new popular boy band song
• What are some inferences you can make about this data?

Download the Data

Website: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/90s-boy-band-lyrics-theyre-all-about-you/
Google Sheet (with Graphs)

Let me know if you used this data set or if you have suggestions of what to do with it beyond this.