6:17, Clustered Conversations
For four days, I observed each of the nine booths in the back of Thorne dining hall at 6:17 PM. I noted the order of the booths and counted how many people were sitting at each booth. I tried my best to include people who had put their backpacks/coats down but were not sitting there at the moment I observed the booth by looking back a couple minutes later. This is the size of the cluster. The number of people in the cluster corresponds to a shape. Zero/one corresponds to a circle, two/three to a triangle, four/five to a square, six/seven to a pentagon, and numbers eight and above to a hexagon. This was determined before the data was collected. Each individual number also corresponds to a color (purple = 0, blue = 1, yellow = 2, brown = 3, green = 4, pink = 5, red = 6, orange = 7), which was determined by a random selection generator online after the data was collected and I knew that the most people observed to be sitting at a booth was seven.
On four small (12” x 12”), square sheets of Arches watercolor paper, I used acrylic paint pens to draw the shapes. Each sheet represents an evening I observed the number of people at each booth, Thursday 2/27, Friday 2/28, Sunday 3/1, and Monday 3/2. I drew the shapes evenly spaced throughout the sheet of paper in a grid. Since I had counted the number of people at each booth in a specific order of booths, the shape representing an individual booth, or cluster, appears in the same spot on the sheet of paper for each day.