My friend and I sat two dogs for a week, and we noticed our conversations that week revolved mostly around the dogs. So, using message exchange data, this is my attempt at reflecting on our eventful time with [DogA] & [DogB].
For context, my friend said yes to dog sitting for her host family for a week, not one, but two dogs with a bonus lizard. So I tagged along to help sit the house as a change of space, as well as experimenting the life with pets.
The two dogs are of the age 12 years and age 7 months. Our tasks as dog sitters are to feed them 3 meals a day, take them for walks, and play ball to wear off some of their energies if time permits. My friend worked on-site M-F 8–5 plus commute, while I worked from home, so I’m responsible for all the pet tasks except feeding them at 6AM.
We’re not always in the house together at the same time, so our communication that whole week is done through messaging, and we refer to the dogs anything from their names to nouns and pronouns: [DogA], [DogB], dog, dogs, them, him, her, it, they, his, hers, its. I thought it would be fun to run a query on the SMS conversation between me and the friend, and see how many time we mention and refer to the dogs throughout the 7 days that we spent with them.
I did a google search to look for template on how to access iMessage history from my Mac and found a helpful post that uses pandas, sqlite3 & python3. After connecting to chat.db database file which contains our chat, I can now query for the conversation exchange with my friend’s number and narrow it down for the 7 dates involved. Then, a python for-loop helped with doing a total count for all instances of the above dog related terms.
The count result was 3, 8, 17, 19, 37, 18 and 2 total daily mentions of the dog throughout the week. For visual aid, below is a bar chart.
date01, date02 and date07 are the days that both me and my friends are at home, so we didn’t text much, which explains the less than 10 mentions of the dog. Whereas date03, date04, date05, date06, we did more texting because the friend had to be out, so the mentions’ counts are all higher.
Particularly, the one interesting thing about this graph is on date05 our chat mentions of the dogs raised to twice the usual mentions on the non-together days. My friend and I looked at this and laughed, because the day before date05, we forgot to feed the dogs for its 3rd meal, and so various chaos followed on date05.
