References to Slum, Ghetto and Poverty

Building upon our earlier maps of rich and poor, we were curious whether there was much difference between user generated references to slum, ghetto and poverty.

As the global map below indicates the differences seem to be primarily based on language with English speaking countries (U.S., Canada, the U.K. Australia and New Zealand) where references to poverty dominate.

Global Map of Slum, Ghetto, and Poverty

This difference becomes clearer as one zooms into the European regional level where references to ghetto appear to be most prevalent in non-English speaking zones. It is likely that this is tied to ghetto being a more internationalized term than poverty and thus shows up more outside the Anglophone world. But overall one can see that these particular search terms are not used ubiquitously across language groups, highlighting again the importance of using non-linguistic keywords for search, e.g., the number 1, or words that are generally unchanged across space. For example, maps of the names of well know international figures like "paris hilton" [1] or "osama bin laden" (this is probably the first time those two have been in the same sentence!).

European Map of Slum, Ghetto, and Poverty

Looking at North America therefore is helpful as it represents largely English speaking (apologies to Quebec and Mexico). While it is clear that there are more mentions of poverty than either slum or ghetto there are some intriguing patterns.

North American Map of Slum, Ghetto, and Poverty

For example, places where references to slum are the most prevalent are relatively rare but do seem to correspond with poor areas such as Watts in Los Angeles and some neighborhoods in Philadelphia and New York. The term ghetto also appears to be most frequent in urban settings (although not all) with the cities of Tampa, Gainesville, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Oakland and Sacramento representing clusters.

Since the term poverty greatly overshadows occurrences of slum or ghetto we also generated a map which just those terms. It is not clear why these differences are here but may simple point to regional linguist preferences with the U.S.

North American Map of Slum and Ghetto

Again, this mapping does not signifying a particular economic fortune in any one area but the prevalence of an array of terms associated with economically disadvantaged areas. Still it produces some intriguing patterns.

[1] Which of course bring up its own problems in the city of Paris and the Hilton Hotel. Maybe we should try Nicole Richie instead?

Rich and Poor Placemarks

So what happens when you search for user generated placemarks containing the words rich and poor? We didn't know but now we do.

Overall the world of user generated data seems to be a fairly rich place. Which is not altogether surprising since the ability to even create a Google placemark (access and ability to use a computer) suggests a certain level of affluence in a world where half the population lives on less that $2.50 a day. That's one reason why much of the globe doesn't have any placemarks at all.

Global Map of Rich and Poor

So it makes most sense to more closely examine East Asian countries of Japan, South Korea (note the clear difference with North Korea) and Taiwan are mostly spotted with "rich" placemarks. Likewise in China (which doesn't have many placemarks in general, a topic for another posting) "rich" is associated with the wealthy coastal regions such as the economic powerhouse of Shanghai, Fuzhou and Ghangzhou.

East Asian Map of Rich and Poor

Moving westward one sees that Europe is much more placemarked (is that even a word?) in general than Asia. But within this, there are interesting patterns as one moves south, east and north from the historic core of Europe. France, the Benelux countries, Germany and Italy systematically have more placemarks referencing rich than poor. But as one moves into the areas of Spain/Portugal and Greece/Turkey, the pattern becomes more varied. There are both fewer placemarks in general and those that do exist are more likely to have references to poor. Perhaps the most striking example is Britain with the core region around London tagged as rich and as one moves northward there is an increasing amount of placemarks referencing poor.

European Map of Rich and Poor

The pattern in the North American context is much less clear. One can see the Northeast (stretching from Massachusetts to DC) is primarily tagged as rich. This tendency toward rich is mostly maintained along the entire coastline. Moving inland, the patterns become much less clear, with the rest of the country seeming to be a nearly equal combination of rich and poor.

U.S. Map of Rich and Poor