Saturday, October 9, 2010

Karen Owen's Duke Sex Thesis and PowerPoint as a Word Cloud

Karen Owen, a former Duke University student, has quickly made a name for herself as both a pioneering figure of female sexual empowerment and the latest social-media pariah, all thanks to a mock 40-plus-page "thesis" she drafted for two close friends in which she "scientifically" documented the sexual prowess of 13 male partners and fellow Duke students, referring to them in her report as "subjects" (many of them Duke lacrosse players).

Of course, this being the Internet era, Owen's thesis did not stay within her circle of friends: Having been forwarded to the Duke student body, it exploded across the Web over the past two weeks, igniting a fierce debate over, well, basically every subject related to modern sexuality. Owen has since apologized for naming names in her document, and as others have pointed out, she's hardly the first young woman to keep and publish such an explicit horizontal (and vertical, for that matter) dossier.

That said, it doesn't look like the controversy surrounding her will die down anytime soon. While numerous experts, pundits and members of the press continue to weigh in on what it all means for Owen and society at large, we here at Surge Desk thought it would be illustrative to run the document through Wordle, a free online application that creates word clouds, to see which terms were the most frequently used in her report.



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