New article on Religious Cyberscapes published in The Professional Geographer!

In what will go down as a shining example of need for patience when dealing with the world of academic publishing, Taylor, Matt and Mark's article on religious cyberscapes has finally been published in the print version of The Professional Geographer... and one issue earlier than expected at that!

While the online-only version has been up for just over a year already, we're happy to have this paper finally reach it's conclusion, nearly two years after its acceptance and well over two and a half years from the time we started working on it.

If you have institutional access, you can find the article on The Professional Geographer's website. If not, get in touch with one of us and we'll satisfy your sheepish craving.

Where are all of the "binders full of women"?

Like Mitt Romney in Tuesday night's debate, we were wondering, where are the "binders full of women" applying to work at FloatingSheep?

So, in typical FloatingSheep style, we found a very talented woman to make a map.  Montse Compa, the Humboldt State University student that produced a map of Big Bird tweets during the last presidential debate, helped us answer this question:

So, despite the many memes devoted to binders full of women and the news coverage of these "viral" memes, there are no women actually in binders. Women live in the material world. But just as Mitt Romney is able to represent women as being in binders, there are plenty of women (and people who like women) on Twitter producing counter-representations, as UK Geography grad student Ryan Cooper discovered with this map of tweets referencing the latest presidential debate screw-up.

The Urban Geography of Klout scores

We decided to dig deeper into the geography of Klout and examine the geography of some of the largest cities in the US. This revealed some very interesting patterns and large differences in the average influence of users in American cities.

Klout scores, for those unfamiliar with them, fall between 0 and 100 and supposedly measure influence (higher scores indicating that a person is more influential). As, we've noted before, this sort of quantification of a person's influence based on online activity is inherently problematic. It defines influence rather narrowly and then ranks each person with a highly decontextualised score that is unlikely to account for the many nuanced ways that influence is perceived and enacted. However, despite the problematic nature of the service, it is nonetheless important to attempt to better understand how it is measuring and representing people.

We therefore decided to calculate the average Klout score of 49 of the largest American cities. The map below displays each city as a circle that is shaded and sized according to its Klout score. In the interest of clarity, only the top-ten and bottom four cities are labelled.

First, a few words on how we collected the data: From April 8th to April 29th, 2012, approximately 195 million tweets were collected via Twitter's "spritzer" access level. Geo-coded tweets were selected using the API's internal methods. The resulting dataset was then cross-referenced against a list of fifty bounding boxes approximating the general conurbation of every city and its suburbs (so as to capture the full scope of the metropolitan area at large). For each resultant bounded set, 1,000 random users were selected from the city and referenced against Klout's score API. For each city, slightly less than 1,000 users are shown, as some of the tweeting users have not been detected and scored by Klout, and as a result have no score.

The city with the best average influence score (29.1) for its users is San Francisco (which perhaps unsurprisingly is also the headquarters of Klout). San Francisco's average score is also interestingly significantly higher than the city with the second-highest average (Austin at 27.8). We then see a tighter cluster of average city scores for Seattle in third place (27.1), and two more Bay Area cities in fourth and fifth: Oakland (27.1) and San Jose (26.8).

At the bottom end of the scale we have Houston (23.3), Jacksonville (22.9), Memphis (22.8), and Virginia Beach (22.7).

Why do we see such variance in the geography of Klout scores? Are people in San Francisco and Austin really that much more influential than people in Houston or Memphis? Klout scores certainly aren't (well, at least they don't appear to be) randomly assigned. They are derived by combining score of number of followers, number of people you follow, number of (and spread of) retweets etc.

But does the geography of Klout actually tell us anything useful about these cities? By themselves, these data tell us almost nothing. They are a very blunt and fuzzy tool applied to a limited sample and we should be hesitant about reading too much into the numbers. However, when brought together with other data and research about information production and consumption, influence, and voice they potentially allow us to us to draw more rounded pictures about the sub-national geographies of the internet.

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One interesting point is the discrepancy between these city-level scores as compared to the national scores conducted in an earlier study. While no conclusive reason has been found for this discrepancy, a few possibilities may create this effect. One theory may be that the users sampled for this report were collected on twitter in April 2012 - many of them may have since decreased the usage of their accounts, and as a result the scores may have decreased. Another theory is that there may be some correlation with users located outside of population centers having higher scores. Despite this, the data being shown was exhaustively assessed in order to determine the extent to which this discrepancy could have been in error, and has found to be accurate.

Visualizing Twitter commentary on the 2012 Presidential Debates

Here at the Floatingsheep virtual compound (located somewhere in wilds of information space between 163.1.201.42 and 137.150.145.240) we are avid followers of the changing trends with culture and politics, particularly as they manifest in the online world.  So it should come as no surprise that we have been tracking the U.S. presidential election over the past months. We were particularly interested by the extent to which Twitter featured in media coverage of the first presidential debate and wanted to take a look at the geography of debate tweets. Moreover, given our general solidarity with all farm yard animals we also wanted make sure we had Big Bird's back [1].

So we fired up the interface to the DOLLY project, which just archived its billionth geocoded tweet last week, to take a look.  By the way, if you are interested in working on maps like this yourself, be sure to check out the Sheepallange.

But before getting to our work let's take a look some other non-geographic work.  The debate was clear a trending topic on Wednesday night with over 10 million tweets sent and this temporal dimension is well illustrated by the graph below and the analysis of Twitter itself. While there are issues with the representativeness of the Twitter universe, it is useful metric to watch.

As geographers, however, we wanted to examine the spatial dimension of these tweets, particularly with respect to the handful of swing states (according to CNN) that have are key in the upcoming election. So we commissioned, at great expense, a series of maps created by Monica's cartography students at Humboldt State University [2]. The goal was to demonstrate the geographic expressions of online political engagement as evidenced by debate-related tweets.

 Catherine Hoyle, a Humboldt State Oceanography major, looked at where people geotagged tweets for Obama or for Romney.

Stephen Mangum, a Humboldt State Geography major, examined the tweets declaring either "Obama won" or "Romney won" in relation to the political leaning of the state.

While the maps above are certainly illuminating, truth be told they skirt the key issue of the candidates' stances on the future of Serinus Canaria Sesamestreetous, with an apparent glandular disorder resulting in extreme size, i.e., the attack on Big Bird by Mitt Romney. We stand in solidarity with our feathered friend, who is a long time advocate of the sheep community. As the video clip below demonstrates, Big Bird has regularly and eloquently spoke out for sheep. "Are you worried about sheep like I am? Well I've been thinking about it a lot, so I wrote a poem, and I'll read it to you so you'll see what the problem is here."

Big Sheep by Big Bird

The Sheep in smaller than a bull

Her nose is black, her coat is wool

We cut her wool off and upset her

To make into a woolen sweater

When winter comes and snowflakes float

She could be could without her coat

So let's be fair when snow is deep

Let's put the sweater on the sheep

Montse Compa, a Humboldt State Environmental Science major, was also worried about Big Bird's employment prospects if Romney wins the election (as Twitter predicted in Stephen's map).  On this map the larger the size of the Big Bird the more Tweets during the debate about Big Bird.

But sometimes a map is not enough, so like our hero Big Bird we turn to poetry as well...

Big Bird by the Big Sheep (aka Matt)

The Bird is bigger than a sheep

Her feathers are yellow, she lives on the street

We threaten her funding and upset her

And worse, make her a debtor.

When winter comes and snowflakes float

She could be insurance-less, with a sore throat

So let's be fair when snow is deep

Let Big Bird, her money keep 

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[1] OK, technically a canary is not a farmyard animal, but where else are you going to be able to put Big Bird?

[2] Actually there was no expense in this. It just sounds better that way.

The Floating Sheep Collective on Podcast....

First, apologies for the lack of updates to the blog.  We've been rather busy this fall and as a result have had fewer really good maps/analysis we wanted to share.  But this will change relatively soon as we get the visualizations from the DOLLY (Data on Local Life and You) project ready for prime time (or at least blog time).

Until then we wanted to pass along a show made by our friends over at the "Science...sort of" podcast in which Monica, Ate and Matt discuss the beer versus church twitter map.  Fun/science is had by all and for a little je ne suis quoi, there is additional discussion about the effect of nuclear bombs on beer.

Check the podcast here and we'll bring back the maps soon, including the SHEEPALLENGE.

Seeking Programmer for Data Visualization Project

Seeking Programmer for Data Visualization Project

The FloatingSheep Collective is seeking a contract programmer for an array of interface design, data handling and visualization tasks to work on the DOLLY (Data On Local Life and You) Project.  The goal of the DOLLY research project is to develop better access to an array of user-generated geodata including our growing databases of geocoded tweets. 

We have developed a scalable back-end database (built on top of existing open source software) that stores, indexes and analyzes a continuous stream of geosocial data on the fly. Since December 2011 this system has processed every geocoded tweet worldwide (~5 million per day) to test robustness and ensure an archive of this otherwise transient data.  We now seek to develop a web based interface to our existing database of 900 million geocoded tweets to allow for data exploration and visualization.  We’re looking for someone with programming ability in javascript and (preferably) ruby, experience with handling big datasets (exposed through ElasticSearch, a RESTful search engine that uses JSON as its data model) and using existing data visualization tools such as D3.  Note: this is a contract position for specific deliverables (which we'll develop in concert with the contractor) rather than an ongoing position.  

If you are interested in working on this project please send a resume and a brief introduction to your experience with building similar interfaces to Matthew Zook (zook@uky.edu).   

In addition to being an academic research project we will also use this data to explore some of the quirkier aspects of life.  In the past we’ve used similar user generated data to create a series of popular maps include “The Price of Weed” (featured in WIRED magazine), “The Beer Bellyof America” (covered by in the New York Times and Economist) and the “Beer vs.Church Tweet Map” (featured in a lot of places).  We also like zombies.

When Google Maps Fails

With the start of the new semester we've not been posting as much but this shall change.  We've got some fun maps in the works.  Until then, we wanted to share this fun example of a Google Maps fail. Earlier we post an example of how the University of Kentucky was relabeled as Transylvania University.

Now apparently, Bally's Casino and Resort is inconspicuously tucked behind a Wal-Mart on the edge of Lexington, KY.  Who knew what lurked in the back alleys of a strip mall?  Thanks to Patrick Bigger who brought this to our attention.

Now we know why Google posts the disclaimer that "These directions are for planning purposes only"!!

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