Arise you Sheeple.....

Thanks for Jeremy Crampton for passing this along and xkcd for creating it. Beware the power of the Sheeple! B-A-A-A-A-A-A!!!!!!!

Also...floating sheep stickers are still available.....Send me your address and I'll mail some out (zook [at] uky [dot] edu). Need motivation? I think we still have an floatingsheep ornament kicking around, which we'll award to some one.

IronSheep 2012: First Glimpses

Apologies for the lack of posts over the past week, but we were first in the thick of IronSheep-itude and then busy trying to catch up on everything (teaching, sleeping, family, personal hygiene, etc.) that we put on hold for the event.

But to sum things up, it was a great success! Not only was it a lot of fun but it helped push forward thinking about how to approach user-generated data and online mapping technologies more generally. Over the next weeks we'll be posting a lot of material/maps from the event, the debriefing session at the AAG and thoughts about next steps.

But first some heartfelt thanks to those who made this event possible. First a very big thank you to Pivotal Labs (especially Magda Kozak) for be so unbelievably generous and helpful in providing the space for IronSheep. It was perhaps the closest thing to map-geek heaven we're going to find in this world. Also many thanks to Sean Gorman of GeoIQ who provided key encouragement and connections (although sadly couldn't attend in the end) and Javier de la Torre of Vizzuality who made the key introductions to secure the space. Thanks to all those who attended the debriefing session at the AAG, there was a lot of good food for thought/debate coming out of that. Towards that end, see the upcoming #geowebchat scheduled for Tuesday, March 6th, with a slightly longer overview of the debate outlined by Jeremy Crampton here.

Thanks to all the floating sheeple – Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton, Monica Stephens, Candice Wallace and Ate Pourthuis – who scrounged data and organization to pull off the event.

The Floating Sheeple

Finally many thanks to all the attendees who were willing to take a chance on something as strange-sounding as IronSheep. They are featured below (in team pictures) and we look forward to hearing from them as they describe their maps.

To start out the IronSheep review, we've posted a number of photos of the event, activities and participants below.

The Rules of IronSheep

Code and Maps: Perfect together

Enter the Trophies

Watching the Presentations

Enthusiasm and Disbelief

Team Lamb Roast: Ryan Burns, Alan McConchie, Adrienne Ottenberg, Jochen Wendel (ignore Taylor in this photo)

Team Haggis: Duane Griffin, Ate Poorthuis, Derek Watkins

Team Lanolin: Iva, Sterling Quinn, Jonathan Rush, Matt Wilson

Team Ramboullet: Janine Glathar, Stéphane Roche, Jim Thatcher, Sarah Williams

Team Lamb Kebab: Craig Dalton, Jason Farman, Bill Morris, Eric Wolf

Team Lamb Chops: Muki Haklay, Sophia B Liu, Thomas Sigler, Tom Swanson

Team Mutton: Holly Jean Buck, Joe Eckert, Stefan Kaup, Lize Mogel

Informal versus OFFICIAL Fun & Vacation

In some of our previous explorations of user-generated representations of place, we looked at the "funnest" places in North America. Although Toronto was by far the "funnest", when normalized by population, Cape Cod Bay looked like the best place to go for a good time (because, you know, nobody actually lives in the bay). In order to get a better grasp on where the fun is and from whence it comes, we compared our previous data on user-generated Google Maps placemarks mentioning the word "fun" with listings in the Google Maps directory that mentioned "fun". In short, how do informal notions of fun (user-generated) compare to OFFICIAL fun (directory listings).

Locations of Informal (user-generated) and Official (directory listing) Fun

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Toronto again appears prominent because of the prevalence of informal, as opposed to official, "fun". Toronto is largely an anomaly among urban areas in North America as most cities are decidedly tilted towards fun of the official type variety. Clearly we need to do some fieldwork in Toronto!

Likewise a considerable area in the rural western U.S. also displays a favoritism towards user-generated/informal fun. Upon further examination, many of the areas displayed in orange above correlate to the locations of US National Parks and National Forests. Because there would be few, if any, directory listings in these protected areas (as opposed to urban areas, which would have a much larger directory), user-generated placemarks are more prevalent than those generated automatically using sources like the Yellow Pages.

Also of interest is the high correlation in the differences between user-generated and directory content for "fun" and the differences between user-generated and directory content for "vacation" (see below). Here again wide swaths of the western US have more user-generated vacation reference than directory content, despite the general trend across the U.S. and Canada being the opposite. One site that shows up prominently as a cluster for user generated fun and vacation is Wall, South Dakota, home to the famous Wall Drug. Many a weary traveler driving across the country on I-90 have sought a few hours of refugee/distraction here. And apparently many have chosen to document it as well.

Locations of Informal (user-generated) and Official (directory listing) Vacation

So even if only in the relative prevalence of user-generated representations of places that are both fun and good for vacationing (don't they go so well together?), rural areas have found their place in the American cyberscape.

Toronto and Cape Cod are the "funnest" places in North America

These maps illustrate the distribution of "fun" in North America as defined by user generated placemarks containing the term. Luckily for society, fun seems to be well dispersed and corresponds with the distribution of population. In other words, where there are people there is also fun. But one can also see concentrations and specializations in fun.


For example, Toronto has a massive (dare we say strategic?) reserve of fun clustered around it. Who knew? I have fond memories of my trips to Toronto but had no idea. The film festival is great, the neighborhoods are fantastic and the underground walkways keep you warm in the winter but how does it all come together to make this mother lode of fun? Jane Jacobs clearly had it right. Perhaps this will become the next invisible export for the region's economy.

Also the Northwest is suspiciously fun. How does that work with all the rain?

Clearly, some means of standardizing "fun" needs to be down to separate the large concentrations from the places that truly specialize in fun. When we use population, i.e., fun per capita, it turns out that Cape Cod, a place outside of Ogden, Utah and Cancun, Mexico have the most fun per person in North America. But before you start planning a vacation to the Great Salt Lake, remember that the high showing outside of Ogden was largely due to a very small population figure.