SheepCamp 2012 Post-Mortem

Now that the Inaugural Workshop on Big and User-Generated Geographic Data (aka SheepCamp) has officially wrapped up, we'd like to extend a big thank you to everyone who made it to Lexington this past weekend to teach each other, learn from each other and begin forming some lasting collaborative relationships.

Apologies to Notorious B.I.G.

For those of you who did NOT make it to Lexington, we'll be reflecting and rehashing many of these discussions as part of our bi-weekly Twitter chats, organized by Alan McConchie under the hashtag #geowebchat (http://mappingmashups.net/geowebchat) on Tuesday at 3pm EST. Twitter conversations from earlier this weekend are grouped together under the Twitter hashtag #sheepcamp.  Also, a semi-permanent pdf version of the tweets from the weekend.

There was lots of good and serious discussion over the weekend working on a research agenda for the geoweb, a repository of tools for collecting and analyzing big and user-generated geographic data, planning for an AAG symposium and possible grants.  But we were also sure to keep tongue firmly in cheek (as is the fashion of the Floatingsheep crew). This includes trying our hand at memes (see above and below), as well as taking a stab at more mainstream book publishing (from Monica's lightning talk):  

We'll be posting  videos and slides of willing participants from the weekend's lightning talks in the coming weeks. Otherwise, we hope everyone enjoys the spatially and temporally distanciated experience of SheepCamp, and that maybe you'll all be able to join us at future iterations. If not sooner, see you all in L.A.!

The Last Night of SheepCamp, Taking a break

The FloatingSheep Advice Animal Meme

The Twelve Posts of Santa, Part VII: German Diversity

Now that we've covered variations on Santa Claus in English, French, Italian and Polish, it's time to turn our attention to German speaking Europe, where a number of versions of Santa abound.

Both St. Nikolaus and Sankt Nikolaus are variations on Saint Nicholas, who is celebrated on December 6th. References to these keywords in the southern portion of Germany make sense, as this region is predominantly Catholic and would have more saints -- of all colors, shapes and creeds (OK, maybe not creeds as they're mostly Catholic) -- and be more likely to celebrate Saint Nicholas' Day.
As a result of the Catholicism in the south, Weihnachtsmann, the guy who delivers presents on the 24th, is more prevalent in Northern Germany, which is mostly Protestant. Perhaps Weihnachten is less anthropomorphized in the south and more of a religious celebration. In the northern part of Germany, evangelic and and less tradition, the Weihnachtsmann bringing presents may play a more prominent role than the religious celebration. Also make sure to be careful with the spelling, as weih nackt mann has a completely different meaning.

Other Santa-like traditions in Germany include the Christkind (Christ child), who also brings presents at Christmas, and is limited to a few scattered sites within our search. Based on a reader's suggestion (thanks!) we included Samichlaus, which shows up as small but very clear cluster in Switzerland, and Kleeschen, which is a tradition in Luxembourg.

Because we were able to see linguistic differences so strongly in our Santa maps, particularly the forthcoming map for Spain, we thought it would be worthwhile to focus on the distribution of the main names for Santa in French, German and Italian. We're particularly interested in Switzerland given its linguistic diversity. We should note that we're not including some local Swiss variants such as Samichlaus in these maps. Still some interesting results.
There is fairly clear division between the French speaking cantons in Eastern Switzerland and the German speaking ones to the North and center. The Italian term of Babbo Natale doesn't seem to have made much headway into the country as of yet.

Of related interest is that increased prevalence of Christkind in Austria which contrasts with southern and northern Germany. Perhaps this serves as the counterweight to to the Austrian preoccupation with Krampus (see map 1). Given that Krampus is the evil one and not the one bringing gifts, this is a bit surprising. But then again, once you get a look at him it's easy to understand why Austrians might be fixated on him.

Krampus

Football (or is it soccer?) in nine and a half languages

On Monday we created a map illustrating the geography of virtual references to the words "football" and "soccer". In today's post, we've added eight more languages into the mix: German, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Chinese. The map below visualizes which of these various ways of referring to "football" are most visible at any particular location in the Google Maps database.

What struck us most was how the map reproduces expected patterns (based on language groups) with very few exceptions: most points in Korea reference the Korean word for football more than the same word in any other language. The same thing is true in Japan, Thailand, Brazil/Portugal and every other country associated with the languages that we conducted this batch of searches in.

Ultimately, Australia wins the prize for having the most homogeneous footballing cyberscape. There is only one place in the country with a reference to football in a language other than English: A reference to Fussball (German) somewhere around the vicinity of Alpine National Park in Victoria. Perhaps there is some sort of odd colony of football playing Germans (is there any other kind?) in this National Park (would any Aussie readers mind checking up on this for us?).

Sweden and Poland are interesting cases: a diverse mix of references to the sport in English (both "football" and "soccer"), German and Spanish, with a small smattering of Dutch and Portuguese. Of course, if we had searched in Swedish or Polish the results would likely have been otherwise.

English appears to be the dominant language for references to the sport in most parts of the world with no direct connection to one of the languages in which we conducted the search (e.g. in Iran, Finland and Russia). We should also point out the the French word for football is "football," so it is difficult to distinguish between references made in English and French using this keyword.

This map is about more than just a sport. We are interested in using this method to study and map cyberscapes in a range of languages. This map was just a first step to test some of the boundaries of the method. We will eventually be mapping a range of other terms in a lot more languages in the near future. Suggestions are welcome.

p.s. This may be a dagger in the heart of many calcio loving Italians, but despite having won the World Cup four times we simply forgot to do a search in your language. Ci scusiamo. We don't know what we were thinking.