Housing does manually categorizes every single request into a bucket. These buckets get very specific (there are different buckets for stoves and microwaves).
Out of the total maintenance requests received, or % are in the top ten codes.
Below are the ten most common types of requests housing receives.
Note that 2004 is lower than expected because the system wasn't put into place until the summer (missing roughly half of the year). Also, the current year will look low because it is incomplete. It will look exceptionally low if you're looking at data before August.
Notice how a ton of requests are submitted in August and, to a lesser extent, in January. These peaks are most likely caused by students moving into new dorms in the fall (large peak in August) and returning to their dorms with new complaints in the spring (smaller peak in January). There is also a subtle peak in May as summer students move in. This can be seen by the rediculously low volume of requests in June and July.
I had a very powerful hunch that buildings with the most requests were either larger or older than other buildings. To control for this, I normalized requests per building by averaging over years since construction and total number of occupants. Presumably, the buildings that are highest on this list should be remodelled soon or were recently remodeled and should slide out of this list pretty soon.
TODO: Actually make this chart.
Over time, Housing has added and discontinued certain classificaitons over time. Here is a graph showing how many different maintenance codes housing used by year.
Out of the total maintenance requests received, only or % of them contain profanity.
Note that a very naive search was done to find profanity and "cock" was removed to prevent excessive false positives with "cockroach."
All maintenance requests are manually categorized by facilities to (presumably) better coordinate plans of action to deal with problems. Below is a table of all request codes seen so far along with some metadata and a manually-guessed description of each code.
Note that "First Occurrence" and "Last Occurrence" are provided to see when a code was first put into use (most of the codes were created long after the 2004 debut of the system) and if they are still used today (several are one-offs or discontinued).