Justin Li

Unique Identifiers

2009-06-29

I was playing with Twitter search recently, and was curious who at Northwestern uses Twitter.

My first instinct, of course, was to just search for "Northwestern University", but it was quickly apparent that people who attend Northwestern don't actually write "Northwestern". Maybe this is due to the assumed common context of the tweeter and the audience ("grounding"); the reader knows the tweeter is at Northwestern, and since conversations try to maximize bandwidth, what is common knowledge is left unsaid.

The question then becomes: what terms would people at Northwestern, and only people at Northwestern use? That is, what phrases are semantically associated with Northwestern?

There were only two that I could think of:

Can you find any other phrases which are unique to Northwestern?