Political Cyberscapes I: Democracies and Dictators

Over the last few weeks, we've posted a series of maps that illustrate the representation of religious groups online via the number of references in Google placemarks. In an attempt to achieve the hat trick of talking about things best avoided at the dinner table, we've turned our (short term) attention to mapping a series of references to a range of political terms. (See here and here for some of the analysis on religion and sex).

The first in a two-part series, these maps show references to the terms "democracy" and "dictatorship" in Google Maps placemarks. In a likely vain attempt to forestall complaints, we would like to note that we fully understand that the reality of governance is never so clear as an either/or choice between democratic or dictatorial rule. In fact, as the findings of these maps show, the complexities of state politics are never as clear as they may seem, especially in this context.

Each of the maps below show the number of placemarks mentioning the keywords "democracy" or "dictatorship", aggregated at the country level across the world. These amounts were then normalized by the total number of placemarks per country, and classified based on the geometrical interval method, which is appropriate given the lack of a normal distribution in these datasets.

References to "Democracy"

The United States and United Kingdom have the highest relative levels of references in placemarks to "democracy". More interesting, however, is that both Iran and Iraq have relatively high numbers of references to "democracy" as well. While both nations maintain elements of democracy (e.g., elections), they are not widely considered to be fully democratic states. Meanwhile other countries such as India with long established democracies have relatively fewer references.

In the case of Iraq, the prevalence of democracy in placemarks is likely associated with the attempts to establish a functioning democratic government as part of the ongoing occupation. Similarly in the case of Iran, the placemarks mentioning democracy are almost certainly related to the mass protests against the Iranian regime following last summer's contested elections. These protests were accompanied by a mass online demonstration using a variety of social media applications and this activity appears to be reflected within Google Maps.

This same anomaly can also be found in the countries with highest concentrations of references to "dictatorship" in the map below, in which many non-authoritarian countries are relatively prominent, while some authoritarian states are not. For example, the U.S. shows up as having a high number of placemarks referencing dictatorship. Again, our method captures interest in a particular keyword within places' cyberscapes and imperfectly reflects offline activities. In this particular instance, the U.S.'s high showing is likely tied to the fact that the U.S. has many placemarks and that the search term was in English.

References to "Dictatorship"

Nevertheless, many current dictatorships - Myanmar (Burma) in southeast Asia, Eritrea in east Africa and Cuba - display some of the highest relative concentrations of the keyword dictatorship. Other countries whose history included authoritarian leaders -- Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Nicaragua -- remain prominent in terms of their online representations. In fact, in contrast to georeferenced mentions of democracy (which seem more oriented towards the potential for democracy in the future) references to the keyword "dictatorship" appear to have more of a historical element to them.

So while there remain some distortions in how the political systems of the world are represented in Google Maps, these maps reinforce our findings that the online representations of place are strongly tied to the physical world. Moreover, in the case of these political cyberscapes, they introduce a new level of temporality - the historical and futuristic references that have previously been absent (or, at the very least, less noticeable) - to our analysis of these online constructions of offline space.

And one of the most fundamental question -- Who gets to make these political definitions? – remains.

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.

Multi-lingual cyberscapes: the case of Bangkok, Thailand

For the most part, our maps have been based on the results of keywords in English which has complicated our analysis at the global level (see here and here). Although many English words are used in other languages, it remains an issue. As a result, we have recently begun mapping and comparing the results of searches based in a variety of other languages including those written using characters other than the Latin alphabet.

This post outlines four terms we searched for in Bangkok in both English and Thai.

The first map is similar to other city-scale maps we've published in the past. However, this time we specifically decided to search for references to beer. This map shows results of searches for placemarks containing the word "beer" overlaid on satellite imagery of Bangkok (courtesy of Google Earth). The color and size of each circle indicates the number of results at every given point. Big red circles have the most references and small purple circles have few. Locations without any circles have no references.

A few parts of the city stand out with an abundance of references to beer: the backpacker ghetto of Khao San Rd at the northwestern corner of the map, Patpong in the middle of the map, and the infamous Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy at the far eastern edge of the map. A cluster of references to beer can also be seen slightly to the north of the main Hua Lamphong train station (the area of white blobs on the map), although we're not really sure why.

"Beer" in English

Interestingly when the same search is conducted using Thai charcters instead of English (เบียร์), a relatively similar pattern is evident. The same areas stand out on the map, although this time Patpong is far more visible. Also evident is the fact that references to beer have a far more dispersed geography in Thai than they do in English. This is likely due to the fact that English speakers are far more likely to reference the few tourist hot-spots in the city, while Thai speakers are more likely to be familiar with a much broader range of places . In any case, we are gratified to see that beer seems to international.

"Beer" in Thai (เบียร์)

This difference in the parts of the city understood and mapped by tourists versus locals can also be observed when a search for "silk" is conducted. Silk is one of famous exports of Thailand and this is reflected in Bangkok's cyberscape. When looking at references to silk in English, we see a map not too dissimilar from the map of beer. Khao San Rd. and Patpong stand out again (likely because silk is often sold in the night markets in both places). The map also picks up references to silk stretching from Patpong down Silom Rd. to the Chao Phraya river and stretching from Nana down Sukhumvit road in both directions (both roads are lined with silk shops that are oriented towards tourists).

"Silk" in English

When the Thai word for silk is used (แพร), a very different pattern can be seen. References to silk are scattered throughout the city without the clear clustering seen in the English (and presumably tourist oriented) cyberscapes of silk. Very different geographies and understandings of place are therefore being constructed between English and Thai representations of the city.

"Silk" in Thai (แพร)

These differences between English and Thai cyberspaces are observable in a whole range of terms. Mapping references to "temple" in English, unsurprisingly highlights the Grand Palace Complex and the many temples in the Phra Nakhon District of the city.

"Temple" in English

A search for the Thai word for temple (วัด) highlights entirely different parts of the city. Instead of the Grand Palace area, we see a focus on the Temple of Dawn and the many other temples on the eastern bank of the river. There are also clusters of placemarks around the Golden Mount, Chinatown and the temples in Sathon (e.g. Wat Yan Nawa). Again these are locations in the city that are more likely to be known and frequented by Thais than foreigners.

"Temple" in Thai (วัด)

Finally, we wanted to look at the geographies of an industry that is far more visible in Bangkok than in most parts of the world: the sex industry. We started with a search for the term "brothel" in English. We see a few dominant clusters showing up on the map: most notably the famous red-light districts of Nana and Patpong.

"Brothel" in English

But when searching for brothel in Thai (ซ่อง), a radically different geography can be seen. The Chong Nonsi area especially stands out (a part of the city not particuarly famous as a red-light district).

"Brothel" in Thai (ซ่อง)

We recognize that ensuring that our terms are equivalent in both languages is problematic and would welcome thoughts on ways to improve our searches. For example, would English speakers use the term brothel or sex club? Or something else?

Nevertheless what this shows, is that very different representations of a city are being produced and reproduced for different people. Our understandings of the cities we move through are heavily influenced by representations of place and we therefore need to find useful ways to map and understand the fluid and sometimes fleeting representations that exist on the internet.

Finding Religion

We've received many comments in response to our latest series of maps of online representations of religion. Some were full of praise while others, well, weren't.

The critiques focused mainly on the fact that the maps didn't include the full diversity of religious beliefs in the world, or that the dominant belief systems of an area didn't necessarily appear in a place's cyberscape. A lot of this can be tied to our decisions about what to map and how to display it. Any map represents a whole range of decisions about what to include and how to display it and obviously some of our decisions rankled the sensibilities of some folks. The Anglicans of the United Kingdom seemed particularly incensed about being classified as Catholic. Jeez, it is almost as if there were decades of dynastical conflict and civil war about the issue of religion in England.

So, in response to the concerns raised by our readers we're featuring a series of maps of different religious terms. All of the maps below plot only the raw number of mentions of a particular keyword in the Google Maps database. Because these maps are not adjusted based on population or the relative specialization of placemarks with the given keyword, densely populated areas and those with higher levels of internet access are more prominently shown. Also, the sizing of the circles are unique to each map and therefore one CANNOT make direct comparisons between maps.

Despite these shortcomings, the maps are more or less indicative of the places where our readers expected to find high concentrations of Anglicans (particularly the U.K.) and Lutherans (northern Europe and the Nordic countries).

Map of Anglican

Map of Lutheran

Although it would appear that parts of the US, Canada and Australia rival the UK in the number of Anglicans, this isn't necessarily the case. Indeed, terms such as the "Church of England," "Church or Scotland" or "Church of Ireland" are used equivalently to "Anglican" in the U.K. but were not one of the keywords in our study.

For sake of comparison, we've also include a map of references to "catholic" in Google Maps placemarks. Remember, one CANNOT directly compare the size of the circles between maps. The sizing is unique for each.

Map of Catholic

The inability of capturing the variety of language used to described a single phenomenon remains a methodological issue for us, but it is one that we are continuing to address. Regardless, our concern is not with purporting to show the actual number of people subscribing to a particular religious doctrine in a particular place, but rather only how religions are represented in the cyberscapes of places.

For example, the terms Atheist and Agnostic are largely located within the U.S. (Southern California and the Northeast) and Europe. Few other parts of the world show the presence of these keywords.

Map of Atheist and Agnostic

References to Scientology, the domain of Hollywood actors like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are similarly concentrated in the places one would expect of them. Although Scientology's status as a religion can surely be debated (and continues to be in many countries, which could help explain the cluster in Germany), one sees large pockets in Los Angeles, where the Church of Scientology is now headquartered, New Jersey, where it was founded, and Clearwater, Florida, where it maintains a large complex.

Map of Scientology

Even Google Maps references to Zoroastrianism, purported to be the oldest known religion but now claiming relatively few adherents, are located in the parts of Iran, the United States, Pakistan and India that continue to have clusters of Zoroastrian believers.

Map of Zoroastrianism

So even the descendants of a religion founded in the 5th century B.C. are on Google Maps. Who knew?

How does the density of placemarks vary across space?

One of the most fundamental questions in our research is also one of the most basic. How does the density of placemarks vary over place? Back in June 2009, we took an initial look at information inequalities but had to rely on keyword searches for "0" and "1" (based on the assumption that there would be no particular spatial bias to these terms) as proxies for the total amount of content produced about a place. It worked fairly well but was less ideal than we hoped.

Recently it became possible to conduct wildcard searches (using the "*" operator) and this post revisits the same question, How does the density of cyberscape vary across locations? We conducted a wildcard search at approximately 260,000 points on the Earth's surface and collected the total number of placemarks indexed there. As always, a direct observation is preferable to a proxy measure so we're quite excited by these maps.

One sees that the United States contains the most placemarks (77 million) with almost twice as many as China which has 43 million. The only other countries that also have over ten million placemarks are the usual suspects when it comes to technology use: Germany, Japan, the UK, France and Italy. However, looking at the raw number of placemarks per country only tells part of the story. So, we decided to normalize these data by population and area. In doing so, some interesting patterns emerge.

Most countries in western Europe have extremely high levels of user-generated content per person despite having fewer placemarks than countries like China or the US. Denmark in particular stands out as having the world's highest ratio of placemarks per person. We're not sure why the Danes are so well represented in cyberscapes. Perhaps Danes have the perfect combination of high levels of disposable time and income to allow them to engage in the construction of user-generated content (the country has the world's highest level of income equality, a large welfare state and one of the highest levels of internet access). An alternate theory (which we're not putting a lot of store in) rests on the well established fact that all things internet-related can usually be explained by pornography. Denmark was the world's first country to legalize pornography and, as such, it stands to reason that they have a head start when it comes to producing content for the internet. We should point out that we haven't yet had a chance to explore the actual content that the Danes are producing.

Moving swiftly on, it is remarkable that China, despite being home to 1.3 billion people, continues to have a relatively high ranking when the data are normalized by population. The finding is a testament to the enormous amount of content being created about China. Interestingly in many of our maps so far, China has not shown up very strongly but this is likely connected to our focus on English search terms. For instance, we're currently searching using the Chinese characters for temple which is producing some interesting patterns that are also much denser than the searches on the English word temple.Finally, we decided to normalize the data by area. Here, very different patterns emerge. Small, densely populated countries like the Maldives and Singapore rise to the top of the list. Much of Europe as well as Japan and South Korea also stand out as having a large number of placemarks per square kilometre.

These maps show that there is no single way to represent the multiplicity of the world's cyberscapes. Depending on the particular way that these cyberscapes are measured and normalized, some quite different results can be found. And yet, irrespective of how the data are measured, a general 'digital divide' can be observed in these virtual representations of place. Western Europe, North America and parts of East Asia are represented by a significant amount of virtual content, while much of the rest of the world (in particular most of Africa and the Middle East) remains, both literally and figuratively, off the map.

T-shirts, Ties and Beer Steins!

It has been a busy week including some great coverage in the New York Times, the Atlantic Magazine, Chicago Sun Times and of course Strange Maps.

We've also gone over the 1000 mark in terms of followers in blogger. We also have a couple of hundred folks getting our tweets. And a few dozen following us via zuurki* feeds.

And we're quite appreciative of all the interest people have shown. Thank you.

To celebrate we've put together a collection of unlikely Floating Sheep consumer products. We may not have a name for our mascot** but we do have t-shirts. And a tie. And a beer stein with the Beer Belly map on it. Stuff which we have trouble imagining that anyone would actually want but through the magic*** of the Internet we are able to offer it to you via the

The FloatingSheep Cornucopia of Consumer Consumption

* A name and technology which we just made up. Not sure what it is or why people would want to use it but it probably involves laser beams. And sharks.

** So far were working with Lambert, Mutton, Plat, Geoid or Datum. More suggestions are welcome.

*** That is, the socially constructed and complex networks of technology, economy, culture, and practice that make up the Internet.

Mapping Christianity

Last week's New Technologies and Interdisciplinary Research on Religion was a fascinating collection of work in this area. Historians, data visualizationists, linguists, sociologists, economists, etc. presented on a wide range of topics which really worked well together. You can find our presentation here.

So after the last week of alcohol and drug related postings I guess you can say that we've found religion! Hallelujah! And returning to our earlier analysis of the cyberscapes of religion, the following three maps take a more fine grained look at representations of Christianity on the internet.

The first map displays references to four types of Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal and Protestant) at a global scale. Vivid patterns are visible on this map. References to "Catholic" dominate in many places. Of course, those who are making placemarks may be more likely to refer to a specific Protestant denomination (e.g., Methodist, Baptist, etc.) which would serve to overstate the level of Catholicism.

However, there are clear clusters of the three other types of Christianity. Most interesting is the fact that references to "Pentecostal" are more visible than references to "Catholic" in most parts of Brazil (and large parts of South America) despite the fact that almost three-quarters of Brazilians identify as being Catholics. Part of the issue is likely down to the fact that we thus far have confined our searches to English-language terms and are therefore missing out on all the references to Catholicism in Spanish. However, it is intriguing that Pentecostalism is so visible in Brazil (perhaps because it is rapidly growing in popularity in the region).

Taking a closer look at Europe, there is a fascinating split between Orthodox Eastern Europe, Protestant Germany, and Catholic everywhere else. In places such as the UK that contain more Protestants than Catholics it is likely that people aren't using the actual term "Protestant" as a signifier of their religion.

Too combat this issue of Protestantism being an overly general term that few people associated with, we also looked at a broader range of terms related to Christian denominations in the US and discovered patterns that are incredibly clear. Catholics are most visible in much of the Northeast and Canada, with Lutherans taking the Midwest, Baptists the Southeast, and Mormons unsurprisingly taking much of the mountain states. Methodists, interestingly, seem to primarily be most visible in a thin red line between the Southern Baptists and everyone else. The obvious (and farcical question) is against whom are they forming a defensive barrier?

Our readers might also be interested in the fact that there are parts of the country in which the Amish are most visible in religious cyberspaces: a somewhat surprising finding given the fact that they are not supposed to be using contemporary technology - let alone be annotating Google placemarks.