Annals of Captioning: Facing the Data

On Thanksgiving, I was at the top of the world and the view was great. My caption, I just learned, had been selected as a finalist for The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest #969, the one with the cornucopia served in a restaurant, by Shannon Wheeler. I'd been entering regularly since Contest #375, so it was nice to be recognized, if maybe just this one time.

But then the contest concluded with my caption ranked at third place in the voting. As a one-time finalist with zero wins, that places me no longer at the summit of Mount Olympus but down in the base camp in the company of a majority of the caption contest finalists. The rankings are maintained meticulously on the Words Below app by Victor Chongchua. It is a humbling thing to behold.

The top rankings go to those contestants who were seemingly born to write captions and who demonstrate their facility consistently. Their names are legend to those who follow the contest. Here are the top ten on the Words Below page as of January 12, through Contest #971:

And where do I fit in? By the Words Below algorithm, I am one of many who share the finalist rank of 180. My winner rank is 912. There are some 1,589 contestants who share both these ranks, defining the largest and lowest echelon of the contestant pool. Second and third place count as the same in this system; if you aren't a winner, you aren't a winner. With the announcement of this week's winner on Monday, the finalist rank and winner rank each went up by one. Currently some 2,586 finalists are ranked on Words Below. Each week, some 5,000 to 10,000 contestants play and three become finalists.

05180