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Mapping User Generated Cyberscapes There is an increasing amount of data in cyberspace that is geo-coded to a particular spot on the earth. People can (and are) documenting their memories, feelings, reactions and biases to places and share them with the world. This project maps and analyzes these cyberscapes (the cloud of geo-coded data in cyberspace which provides an additional layer for human interaction) as represented in Google Maps. Dr. Matthew Zook, Dept of Geography, U.K. This project is dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated generated information about places. The results provide one glimpse of what internet users (in the aggregate) think about particular places. This project’s blog is www.floatingsheep.org 2008 Presidential Election Abortion Providers & Abortion Alternatives Baptists & bibliophiles Great American Pizza Map Leisure Time? This map shows the difference in the number of mentions of "Barack Obama" or "John McCain" in user-generated placemarks indexed by Google Maps as of August 2008. This visualization represents the aggregation of myriad decisions of Internet users (versus mainstream political, media or corporate interests) to associate the name of a presidential candidate with a specific place. Much media coverage was devoted to the Obama campaign’s innovative uses of the Internet to rally supporters, and these results provide evidence to those claims. In most places Barack Obama has a level of visibility in the virtual landscape that is unmatched by John McCain. There are, however, places (such as New Hampshire) where McCain is far more visible than Obama throughout the state. This fact likely owes much to McCain’s strong grassroots support in New Hampshire that ultimately helped him to win the state’s crucial Republican presidential primary. In this visualization, the difference between the number of abortion alternatives (counseling efforts to convince woman not to choose an abortion) and abortion providers listed in the Google Maps directory is mapped across the US. The greatest difference in favor of abortion providers is found in New York City, with Los Angeles and Seattle representing a similarly disproportionate number of abortion providers. This concentration of abortion providers has a strong urban bias. However, there are many cities such as Atlanta, Dallas and Cincinnati which have more abortion alternatives than providers while some rural areas such as upstate New York and Maine have more providers. Overall, the blue coverage across the United States shows that, in a vast majority of the country, abortion alternatives are much easier to find than abortion providers. This maps is based on the number of Google Maps directory listings for "bookstores" and "churches". As there are an overwhelmingly larger number of churches than bookstores nationwide each variable is normalized based on its mean value. For the most part, the relative prevalence of bookstores occurs in and around the big cities, L.A., and the megalopolis of the eastern seaboard have the highest concentrations in favor of bookstores. Even cities such as Atlanta, nestled in the Bible Belt of the American southeast, tend towards a relatively large number of bookstores. On the converse, other large cities like Dallas, San Antonio and Houston continue to favor churches, with New Orleans (the largest city in Louisiana) having the highest relative concentration of churches in the nation. Suburban areas surrounding large population centers also show a near-universal favoritism for churches. Using the number of listings indexed by the Google Maps directory, this map visualizes the comparative prevalence of churches, bowling alleys, guns and strip clubs across the US. Each point is color coded according to which activity had the most number of hits in the Google Maps directory. Upon first glance, it is easy to see the relative supremacy of two topics, churches and guns, which cover most of the points in North America. Of particular interest are the small pockets in which either bowling alleys or strip clubs are most numerous, bucking the near-universal trend focused on guns and church. For example, there is a prevalence of strip clubs around Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, as well as Los Angeles, California. The few areas in which the bowling alleys outnumber churches, guns and strip clubs, seem to be exclusively rural, so their classification may simply be a result of there not being much else there. This map compares the number of user generated references to "pizza", "guns" or "strip club". The map reveals that America seems to be largely pro-pizza with the red dots of pizza spreading across the landscape (the Midwest and Northeast seem particularly well endowed) like a rich and robust tomato sauce. There are a number of clusters -- represented by green dots (green olives, peppers, pesto?) – with more references to guns than pizza. Lastly one sees a few scattered locations where strip clubs are more popular (e.g., Las Vegas) than either guns or pizza. Much like a token scattering of pineapple that one is forced to endure on pizza (there's always one person who suggests it!), strip clubs represents a decidedly marginal activity in the aggregation of human experience illustrated in this map. User Generated Religion Are there distinct geographies to religious references in user-created content indexed by Google? The following maps visualizes the comparative prevalence of the terms “Allah,” “Buddha,” “Hindu,” and “Jesus” (chosen due to their linkages with the major religions of Islam, Buddahism, Hinduism, and Christianity). Each point is color coded according to which term had the most user generated references within Google Maps at a particular location. This map mirrors many of the expected religious geographies of the offline world: references to Allah being most prominent in the Middle East, references to Buddha being most prominent in East Asia, references to Hindu being most prominent on the Indian subcontinent and references to Jesus being prominent in Europe and much of the Western Hemisphere. It does also highlight the sometimes scattered nature of religious practice in the world. It is also informative to map religion compared to references to the word ("sex"), a popular and international used term with very different connotations than the religious keywords. The purpose of including this term is to compare user interest in religion to user interest in sex. In Asia there are very few places where there are more references to sex than Allah, Buddha, Hindu or Jesus. In contrast, Western Europe (especially the UK and Scandinavia) and North America (especially the East and West Coasts) there are more references to sex than any of the four religious terms that we searched for. There are, however, exceptions such as the Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal which continue to show more references to Jesus. New York City’s Cyberscapes These maps illustrate one of the "cyberscapes" of New York City, i.e., the cloud of geo-coded data in cyberspace which provides an additional layer for human interaction. Cyberscapes, consist of multiple layers, e.g., Google placemarks, Wikipedia articles, geotagged Flickr, Twitter Tweets, etc., but the metro maps are limited to user generated placemarks. These maps illustrate how these cyberscapes vary over location and topic All User Generated Data User Generated Data Referring to Crime
