Celebrating the One Year Anniversary of America's Beer Belly

Today is an important day, but you probably don't know why. In the lore of Floatingsheep, February 1st is a very important day...

One year ago today, the wonders of America's Beer Belly, as discovered by the Floatingsheep Collective, were announced to the world-at-large. By far the most popular single post in our relatively short history, the Beer Belly of America was eventually featured everywhere from The New York Times and Andrew Sullivan's blog on The Atlantic to Strange Maps, FlowingData and the Consumerist.

The Beer Belly of America

Our extrapolation that the prevalence of bars as compared to grocery stores in the American upper Midwest (using directory listings from Google Maps) was indicative of some cultural characteristic may or may not have been especially daring. But one thing is clear: in addition to the official statistics from the Census Bureau, the innumerable comments generated on this blog and many others served as corroboration for our claims.

Whether it took us 'discovering' it, or just giving it a name, we now know that Wisconsin, Illinois and much of the Great Plains are the true Beer Belly of America.

Visualizing Digiplace

Two of the basic concepts we use here at Floatingsheep are:

Cyberscape, or the cloud of geo-coded information through which we move everyday (handy visualization of cyberscape here).

AND

Digiplace, or the sorting of cyberscapes, often by software algorithms such as Google’s pagerank, to filter content and avoid information overload. A key part of digiplace is how it makes some parts of the cyberscape more visible while peripheralizing other areas.

We’ve never had a good visualization of digiplace…at least until now. But Taylor’s recent search (via his iPhone) on Google Maps for the keyword "Kroger grocery" resulted in a nice example. In the image below, Kroger’s is in the upper left and is marked by a red push pin. Interestingly, Meijer's, another grocery store chain, also shows up as a sponsored link. Digiplace in action.

Digiplace

While Google Maps does clearly label Meijer’s as a “sponsored link”, i.e., "paid for placement”, the digiplace produced by this search does change visibility within the retail landscape.

For further reading, see:
Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. The Creative Reconstruction of the Internet: Google and the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace. GeoForum 38(6): 1322-1343

Zook, M. and M. Graham. 2007. Mapping DigiPlace: Geo-coded Internet Data and the Perception of Place. Environment and Planning B 34(3): 466-482.

The Beer Belly of America in 3D

After Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, we've noticed a 3D craze happening that we feel a bit left out of. So we decided to turn one of our most popular maps (the beer-belly of America) into a 3D visualisation. No 3D glasses necessary. Although sea-sickness pills may be recommended for those who might feel slightly unsettled watching a spikey map of the U.S. lurch across the screen.

Of course, since our budget is slight smaller than Hollywood's, you may find it harder to lose yourself in the magic of animation. Also, for some reason the happy beer belly has been transformed into a spikey midwestern landscape of doom. And the blue grocery store map reminds us too much of what we saw last time we looked under a table at the cafeteria.

But besides that, it is just like Avatar.

Groceries, groceries and yet more groceries

Since the comparison between grocery stores and bars helped identify the beer belly of America, we thought it would be worthwhile to check out the distribution of grocery stores in general.

Unfortunately we were wrong. It is really rather uninteresting.

Don't even look at this map showing the absolute number of mentions of grocery stores in the Google Maps directly. It simply shows that they are everywhere that people are. DON'T LOOK!

Absolute Number of Grocery Stores Listed in the Google Maps Directory

Even when we normalize the data to create a measure of grocery store specialization, we end up with a big YAWN. Urban areas have more grocery stores per capita than rural areas.

Relative Number of Grocery Stores Listed in the Google Maps Directory

No doubt tied to the higher division of labor (e.g., more specialty grocery stores) that large centers of population have as well as the fact that urban areas have higher land costs and fewer available large parcels that results in a built environment of more (albeit smaller) establishments.

Wow… it's rather sad that we spent as much energy as we did to create this. It's boring. Much like the act of shopping for groceries. But like grocery shopping, it needs to be done. But hopefully by someone else, next time.

Apologies all around. Next post we'll show more interesting like urban maps of user generated references to crime or distribution of escort services…stay tuned.

The Beer Belly of America

At FloatingSheep, we're willing to search for and analyze almost anything that falls within the realm of human experience. Sometimes this is mundane (pizza) and sometimes it is contentious (abortion) but most of the time it falls somewhere in between. Such as, where can I get a drink?


Total Number of Bars


We were quite surprised, however, when we did a simple comparison between grocery stores and bars to discover a remarkable geographically phenomenon. We had expected that grocery stores would outnumber bars and for most parts of North America that is the case. But we could also clearly see the "beer belly of America" peeking out through the "t-shirt of data".



Starting in Illinois, the beer belly expands up into Wisconsin and first spreads westward through Iowa/Minnesota and then engulfs Nebraska, and the Dakotas before petering out (like a pair of love handles) in Wyoming and Montana.

The clustering was so apparent that we wanted to check how it compared to the "official" data on this activity. So we gathered 2007 Census Country Business Pattern on the number of establishments listed in NACIS code 722410 (Drinking places (alcoholic beverages)) and divided by Census estimates for state population totals for 2009 and found remarkable correspondence with our data.

On average there are 1.52 bars for every 10,000 people in the U.S. but the states that make up the beer belly of America are highly skewed from this average.

Rank	State	Bars per 10,000 Population
1	North Dakota	6.54
2	Montana	6.34
3	Wisconsin	5.88
4	South Dakota	4.73
5	Iowa	3.73
6	Nebraska	3.68
7	Wyoming	3.4

Another slice of the Google data which shows the relative number of bars in a location further confirms this concentration. So looks like Wisconsin is your best bet.


Specialization in Bars