Used or discussed?
Lake Ontario and Lake America in YouTube comments — separating name use from name talk in a frozen first snapshot of pre-existing comment sections
PDFZenodoReplication and provenance
Abstract
A newly introduced place name can become visible because people are arguing about it. Counting the string cannot tell that apart from ordinary referential use.
This rapid-response study separates those functions in YouTube comments after the 27 August 2026 US federal renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America. A contemporary corpus was used to build and test the coding distinction; the measure was then applied to a separate, prospectively frozen panel of 35 pre-existing Lake Ontario videos selected on pre-intervention criteria.
In the first post-intervention window, exact Lake America appeared in 11 comments across four videos: ten discussed, corrected, reported, evaluated or joked about the name; one used it as an ordinary reference. The first snapshot is intentionally small and descriptive. Later observations were fixed in advance; the next one, on 22 December 2026, is coordinated with a Wikipedia study of the same renaming.
Comments
Comments, corrections and refutations are welcome: research@woidwide.net. If relevant work has been overlooked, I apologise and would be glad to be told.
AI use: the author designed the study and set all analytic decisions and decision rules; Claude (Anthropic) was used under his direction to draft text and analysis code and to compute the figures, and the author revised the text. The paper sets out the division of labour in detail.
Citation
Sedlmair, Max (2026). Used or discussed? Lake Ontario and Lake America in YouTube comments. Preprint, version 1.0. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23303764