HOW THE STRANGENESS SCORE WORKS
Every entry in the register carries a number out of ten. It is not a rating of how much you will enjoy the place, and it is not a measure of quality. It is an attempt to say, on four fixed axes, how far a place sits from ordinary.
The score is the mean of the four axes below, rounded to the nearest whole number. Each axis is scored 1 to 10 by one person reading the same sources for every entry, which makes it consistent rather than objective. The figures on this page are generated from the register itself, so they move when the register does.
THE FOUR AXES
Could you see this somewhere else? A 10 means the place is the only one of its kind, in Florida or anywhere. A 5 means the type is common and this is a good example of it.
Highest: Cape Romano Dome House at 10. Lowest: Big Betsy the Lobster at 5. 7 of 60 entries score a full 10 here.
How strange is the reason it exists? This rewards the account of how the place came to be, not the place itself: a grudge, an obsession, a misreading of a permit.
Highest: Ancient Spanish Monastery at 10. Lowest: The Devil's Millhopper at 6. 25 of 60 entries score a full 10 here.
How close is it to the edge? A 10 is a ruin actively being taken back by the water or the vegetation. A 2 is fully funded and climate-controlled. High is not better, it is a different kind of visit, and it is the axis most likely to change between one year and the next.
Highest: Cape Romano Dome House at 10. Lowest: The Dalí Museum at 2. 3 of 60 entries score a full 10 here.
How far do the people responsible take it? Signage, festivals, gift shop, the willingness of a town to answer the phone in character. This is the axis that separates a roadside object from a place that is still being maintained as an argument.
Highest: Barberville Yard Art Emporium at 10. Lowest: Desert Inn, Yeehaw Junction at 4. 16 of 60 entries score a full 10 here.
WHAT THE SCORES ACTUALLY DO
The composite score only uses 4 of its ten values. Nothing in the register scores below 6 or above 9, because a place has to already be strange to be one of the 60 entries. If you are comparing two entries, the four axes underneath will separate them and the composite often will not.
Backstory is the least discriminating axis: 25 of 60 entries score a full 10, which says more about what gets into the register than about the places. Disrepair is the most useful, spanning 2 to 10, and it is the one that will be wrong first, because buildings fall down.
No entry scores 10 on all four. The widest internal disagreement is The Dalí Museum, 8 points between its highest and lowest axis, which is the kind of place the composite describes worst.
USING THESE FIGURES
The scores are published under CC BY 4.0. Use them anywhere, including commercially, including in something that argues they are wrong, as long as you say where they came from. Every place page also publishes its four axis values as structured data, so they can be read without scraping the page.
Cite as: Strange Florida, strangeness scores for 60 places in Florida, https://strange-florida.com/method.html
That licence covers the scores and the four axis values, which are the part of this site that is ours to give. It does not cover the photographs: those are other people's work under their own terms, mostly CC BY-SA and public domain, recorded one by one in the photo credits.