This folder contains all of the data used in The Pudding essay 30 Years of American Anxieties: What 20,000 letters to an advice columnist tell us about what—and who—concerns us most. published in November 2018.
Below you'll find metadata for each file.
- What is this?: 20K questions written in to Dear Abby.
- Source(s) & Methods: This includes questions publicly available on https://www.uexpress.com/, as well as a number of questions from the mid-1980s, obtained through digital copies of newspapers which included Dear Abby questions.
- Last Modified: 11/28/2018.
- Contact Information: Ilia Blinderman
- Temporal Applicability: 1985-Fall of 2017
- Observations (Rows): Each row represents a single question or letter published in the Dear Abby column.
- Variables (Columns):
| Header | Description | Data Type |
|---|---|---|
| year | Letter publication year | number |
| month | Letter publication month | number |
| day | Letter publication day | number |
| url | URL where question may be found alongside the answer | text |
| title | Title of the column wherein the letter appeared | text |
| letterId | Number of the letter, when multiple letters appear | number |
| question_only | Text of the question | text |
