Sheep, Cookies, and Material Things

Many people ask "why floating sheep?" and there are answers (see link above: why floating sheep?), but we thought it was time to finally admit the true origin of the name [1], rather than mumble something about digital data, materiality, and floating.

You see, sheep do indeed sometimes come attached to red balloons, as documented by Vermont-based geographers and sheep farmers Ethan Mitchell and Susannah McCandless. As shown, in the photographic evidence below, an apparent cultural practice of Vermont farmers is to attached red balloons to sheep suspected of demonic position by virtue of possessing six legs. Non-demonic sheep are expected to demonstrate their innocence by floating above the material plane.

Sadly for this sheep, it remained stubbornly earthbound, despite the addition of sticker to the red balloon.

But all is not lost as apparently the extra legs where due to a pair of quiet lambs, and there is absolutely nothing creepy about the silence of the lambs.

Or the curious examination of red balloons by a herd of sheep. Thanks for the photos Ethan and Susannah! 

This whole review of sheep, demons, balloons and silence naturally leads us to ponder questions about how material objects are influenced by the immaterial data on the web.  For example, this booth sponsored by Oreo at SXSW that "created an algorithm"[2] to determine what flavor of cream filling should be used in a 3D printing of Oreo cookies based on what is trending on twitter allowing one to "eat the tweet". Which brings up the obvious question of what a bieber or kardasian or twerking oreo would taste like.

This leads into bigger questions about how digital words have material influence on the natural environment, e.g., Can Tweeting be used to a plant help it grow?  This study aimed to find out if talking would encourage growth.  Other studies have used twitter feeds to create music by assigning sounds to particular words from a subset of users, or the emotional content of tweets in entire regions. 

Of course, none of this really explains the why behind the name Floatingsheep. Suffice it to say that it was determined through the construction of a specially designed algorithm.

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[1] Or simply add to the general fog and confusion about the name.
[2] Kudos, for providing such detailed specifics on the "algorithm". #irony

Artists, Bankers, Hipsters and the "Bro-ughnut" of New York: Mapping Cultural-Economic Identities on Twitter

It's long been established that cities are the centers of social media activity. And while there remains a great deal of internal differentiation in these cities, especially between those with access to the necessary technologies and those without, one way this kind of social media data can be put to use is in identifying variations in different cultural-economic identities that go beyond those classified by official statistics (e.g., race, income, occupation), and how these different groups make use of different spaces within the city [1].

These maps are based on all geotagged tweets sent in the New York City metropolitan area (as defined by the extent of the maps) between June 2012 and March 2014, collected from the DOLLY Project at the University of Kentucky. Using a series of keywords, we are able to visualize the spatial distribution of some of these cultural-economic indicators and identities as manifest in this data. But rather than just plotting points representing the locations of these tweets, which can tend to resemble complete noise or rather obvious patterns such as population density, we've cleaned and normalized the data in such a way as to minimize the potential effects of a small number of active Twitter users skewing the dataset, the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem and the potential mimicking of population density.

The first of these maps compares references to the often derisive terms 'hipster' and 'bro'. Although mortal enemies in the wild [2], we wanted to see whether domestication (via urbanization and Twitter) might cause these archetypes to adapt different grazing patterns.

There are a total of 12,319 tweets mentioning the subcultural signifier for those with tight pants, pseudo-progressive politics and pretentious taste in just about everything, which are overwhelmed in absolute numbers by the 239,412 tweets referencing the male, college-aged partying demographic. But through normalization techniques like the location quotient, we are able to more accurately compare the relative number of references to these terms.

The "Bro-ughnut" of New York: Tweets Referencing 'Hipster' and 'Bro'

The highest concentration of references to 'hipster' (shown in the darkest hexagons, which represent location quotients greater than one) are located in the gentrifying areas of Brooklyn such as Dumbo, Prospect Park and Williamsburg, as well as the SoHo/NoHo neighborhoods and the area around Columbia University in Manhattan, which reinforces the all-too-often-commented-upon relationship between hipsters and gentrification. These areas are surrounded by a much more extensive belt of tweets referencing 'bro', suggesting a clear spatial divide between these two groups within the city. The circular pattern of this difference gives rise to what we like to call the "bro-ughnut"[3] of New York City, which envelops the creamy center of hipsters (perhaps made from the leftovers from the cupcake shops populating the area) [4]. 

In addition to this spatial-cultural distinction between the much maligned hipsters and bros (or perhaps mirroring it), another longstanding conflict in New York City is between the bohemian artists and the monied class of jet-setting global financiers. Rather than using references to terms in the text of tweets, this map visualizes the relationship between tweets sent by users who self identified as 'bankers' (n=19,037) versus those sent by 'artists' (n=759,027). This difference in numbers also suggests a possible public policy initiative in which every banker is assigned 40 artists to support and nurture.

Tweets by Self-Identified Bankers and Artists in New York City

Rather than the clear circular pattern evidenced in the map of hipsters and bros, the spatial signature of tweets by bankers and artists shows a much more variegated pattern, but with some clear connection with offline geographies associated with these two groups. Tweets from bankers (again shown in the darkest hexagons) tend to be concentrated, unsurprisingly, in the financial district in lower Manhattan. In addition, they can be found in the high-end, exclusive residential areas of the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan, and more suburban locations like New Rochelle, Little Falls and Staten Island. There is also a concentration of bankers tweeting at the area airports, seen most clearly at JFK, but also at the LaGuardia and Newark airports. But given the overall higher number of artists tweeting, it is thus unsurprising that these tweets are much more widely distributed throughout the area, with significant concentrations of activity throughout Brooklyn, upper Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx.

These two examples illustrate how using more context-appropriate methods for aggregating and visualizing geotagged social media data can provide meaningful (or at least interesting!) insight into the spatial distribution of cultural-economic identities in the city. While this kind of data isn't appropriate for all questions, it allows for an investigation of concepts, ideas and geographies that go beyond those captured by official statistics.

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[1] A version of this post (sadly without snarky footnotes) is forthcoming in the Cityscape journal, a publication of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
[2] As documented by 19th century German archaeologist Heinrich von Kaesewurst-Schmackhaft in his pioneering studies of proto-hipsters and proto-bros in Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh. Kaesewurst-Schmackhaft's translation is as follows:

Humbaba’s, (father of all hipsters) mouth is fire;
his roar the floodwater; his breath is death.
Enlil made him guardian of the Cedar Forest before it became cool,
to frighten off the mortal bros who would venture there.

But who would venture there?
Humbaba’s mouth is fire; his roaris the floodwater; he breathes and there is death.He hears the slightest sound somewhere in the ForestAnd comes stalking, enclosed in skinny jeans, pretension and ironyEnlil made him terrifying guardian,
Whose mouth is fire, whose roar the floodwater.

[3] Credit/infamy for this term goes to Doyle Stevick.

[4] According to Google, the phrase "creamy center of hipsters" has never been used before. Another first for the sheep but we can only hope that the phrase is never used again.

Are there really more juggalos than polar bears?

Here at Floatingsheep, we tend to be concerned with the most pressing issues currently facing humanity. We've been known to tackle issues ranging from racism and hate speech to the drug trade and the coming zombie apocalypse. But up until now, we've never addressed an issue seen by many to be the defining challenge of our time: the global climate crisis. While we would have loved to cover this kind of issue a long time ago, we were unsure of how we could use the wealth of geotagged social media data at our fingertips to address such big problems. That is, until we came across this (now somewhat dated) gif featuring David Cross:

In fact there are more juggalos on earth right now, than there are polar bears.
You're kidding me, right?
Nope.

Though this statistic is striking -- designed to play on society's penchant for valorizing facts, delivered by bearded men, about charismatic megafauna like the polar bear -- like any good geographers we immediately latched onto its lack of geographic context. As much as we have come to trust celebrity spokespeople (after all they are the most knowledgeable people on the planet) we feel that occasionally we should do some fact-checking.

While we should certainly be sympathetic to the plight of the polar bear, if not for its cuddliness (once you get past their ability to eat you), than at least as a proxy for global biodiversity, this is only a partial story. Like any other social phenomenon, both juggalos [1] and polar bears are distributed unevenly throughout space, which isn't accounted for by only relying on these global level statistics.

So we sought out to find answers to the following questions: do juggalos and polar bears tend to inhabit the same spaces? does the growth of juggalos coincide with the decline of polar bears? are juggalos as affected by the global climate crisis as polar bears? or do juggalos pose an existential threat to polar bears?  And perhaps the most interesting question, are juggalos actually polar bears in disguise?

Based on our preliminary research, we chose to limit our analysis to the continental US, as it is the center for juggalo activity around the world. Indeed, no other country in the world has anything approaching parity between tweets mentioning juggalos and those mentioning polar bears. If we are to make the (obviously safe, non-controversial, and totally scientifically accurate) assumption that geotagged tweeting is perfectly representative of the world-at-large, this is a potential hole in the argument advanced by the aforementioned meme. So we will simply ignore this fact and instead interpret it as the first promising sign for environmentalists concerned about the twin calamity faced by the extinction of a highly visible species and the mass of empty Faygo bottles that will have to be cleaned up when the juggalos are running the place?

Collecting all geotagged tweets from July 2012 to mid-April 2014 referencing "polar bear" and "juggalo" (or variations thereof), we produced the map below to get a firmer grasp on the geographies of the juggalo vs. polar bear antagonism. There are a total of 23,742 tweets referencing polar bear in this time frame, with just 15,781 mentioning juggalo, giving us reason to believe that the polar bears (and, well, humanity as a whole) might still have some hope left. That is, unless all of the polar bear-related tweets are simply commenting on the futility of saving these animals and the fact that they're all dying before our very eyes.

Geotagged Twitter References to Juggalos vs. Polar Bears

As our analysis shows, significant portions of the continental United States, shown in both white and grey, are home to no significant concentrations of either juggalos or polar bears. And while the spatial distribution of both terms is somewhat random [2], the highest concentrations of polar bears tend to be in large US cities known for their zoos. Sunny San Diego seems to be the most likely safe haven for polar bears, while Chicago, New York City and Atlanta are all characterized by their relative wealth of polar bears and lack of juggalos. And while San Diego and Atlanta are perhaps the most stark in this respect, it is interesting to note that polar bear tweeting doesn't seem to be concentrated in the country's colder climates. Perhaps the polar bears are themselves influenced by space-time compression and have decided to partake in seasonal migration to the south pole and are being spotted by Twitter users during brief pitstops in North America?

Juggalo-related tweeting has a significantly different, if still somewhat random, spatial signature. Rural Pennington County, Minnesota has both the highest absolute and relative number of juggalo tweets, due to what appears to be a lone, extraordinarily active member of the juggalo Twitterverse [3]. Based on the overall levels of tweeting, most juggalos still demonstrate a kind of agglomeration process, just not in the country's major urban areas. For instance, Salt Lake City, Utah has the second highest predominance of juggalo tweeting in the country, while the suburban counties around St. Louis, Birmingham and Boston are all relatively dominated by juggalos.

But the absence of a couple of key places from this list warrants further attention. First is the Detroit area, not to mention the rust belt more generally, which is known as the home of ICP and the juggalo subculture. While Wayne County has the sixth most juggalo tweets in the country in absolute terms, it also has a relatively sizable number of polar bear tweets, resulting in only a moderate advantage for juggalo-related tweets. So, were we to assume that juggalos and polar bears are not mutually exclusive or threatening to one another, perhaps we should look to Detroit as a potential site for a polar bear sanctuary when all of the ice melts?

Similarly, Worcester, Massachusetts, declared by ICP co-founder Violent J as perhaps the band's favorite city to perform in, actually displays a slightly greater concentration of polar bear tweeting than juggalo tweeting, which unfortunately might lead the clown posse to reconsider this favoritism. Luckily enough, this concentration of polar bear tweeting in Worcester seems to only be related to a key city landmark, the inflatable polar bear on top of the Polar Soda Factory that greets passerby on I-290, rather than a real concentration of polar bears. Nonetheless, the local prominence of Polar Soda has surely cut into the market of a key juggalo commodity: Faygo.

As our analysis has shown, there is more to the story of juggalos and polar bears than meets the eye. Clearly, there are more references to polar bears than to juggalos, both globally and in the United States. But the relationship between these two is considerably more complex and contradictory than is assumed by David Cross and his ilk. Obviously more research is required as ten-second gifs are not up to conveying the complexity of the juggalo-polar bear ecosystem.

While the parity in juggalo and polar bear-related tweeting in some places could indicate peaceful coexistence, so too could it mean the potential for bitter rivalry and resentment, as also indicated in the near complete lack of references to one or the other in some areas. Either way, it's probably best to just take refuge in one of the many places with no references to either juggalos or polar bears, as you should not wish to encounter either in the wild. Godspeed.

UPDATE (1:30pm): Be sure to check out this infographic, which we were previously unaware of, which explores some of these same issues surrounding the relationship between endangered species and Juggalos.
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[1] Juggalos are, of course, followers of the band Insane Clown Posse.
[2] As in, completely freakin' random.
[3] We're not sure if there is a scarier phrase in the English language than this one. All 13,929 or so other residents of Pennington County, Minnesota are advised to seek cover.

Catch Floatingsheep at AAG 2014 in Tampa

The Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers is upon us! Find below a close-to-comprehensive schedule of where you can find your favorite Ovis geographers during the conference, as well as some places you can find other interesting stuff, too!

Tuesday, April 8

The conference kicks off with three successive sessions organized by Matt and Mark, in which they'll also be presenting.

1156 Data Shadows and Urban Augmented Realities I: Practicing Data Shadows
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Grand Salon E, Marriott, Second Floor

1256 Data Shadows and Urban Augmented Realities II: Coding Data Shadows
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Grand Salon E, Marriott, Second Floor

1456 Data Shadows and Urban Augmented Realities III: Tracking Data Shadows
12:40 PM - 2:20 PM in Grand Salon E, Marriott, Second Floor

Running concurrent with those sessions will be a couple of other sheep-related sessions that Monica has a hand in. First is a panel on 'tribes' organized by Renee Sieber, which Monica will be participating in. After that is a paper session organized by Monica and Joe Eckert, in which Ate will be presenting a paper.

1122 Battle of the Tribes: geoweb, GIS, GI Science, cyberGIS, neogeography
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Room 22, TCC, First Floor

1216 Alternative Computation and Unconventional Spaces
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Room 16, TCC, First Floor

Ironsheep 2014 will be held from 5-9pm on Monday evening at the Tampa Bay Wave. Check here for more details.

Wednesday, April 9

Matt and Matt 'the' Wilson also have organized a star-studded panel session on the future of GIScience education featuring Sarah Elwood, Nadine Schuurmann and Mike Goodchild, among others.

2154 Visioning GIScience Education
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Grand Salon C, Marriott, Second Floor

There's also the alt.conference on Big Data co-organized by friends-of-sheep Joe Eckert, Jim Thatcher and Andy Shears. Various floating sheeple will be participating in these sessions at different times and in different capacities.

2210 alt.conference on Big Data: Opening Panel
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Room 10, TCC, First Floor

2410 alt.conference on Big Data: Lightning Panels
12:40 PM - 2:20 PM in Room 10, TCC, First Floor

2510 alt.conference on Big Data: Tech Demos
2:40 PM - 4:20 PM in Room 10, TCC, First Floor

2610 alt.conference on Big Data: Lightning Talk Discussion
4:40 PM - 6:20 PM in Room 10, TCC, First Floor

The Annual Kentucky-Arizona Wildcat Party, where you can often find the floating sheeple, will be held on Wednesday night at the Double Decker (1721 E. 7th St.), starting at 8pm.

Thursday, April 10

On Thursday, Taylor has organized two sessions on the smart city with Alan Wiig from Temple University. Taylor will be presenting in these sessions, along with Matt Wilson and Rob Kitchin.

3130 Thinking the 'smart city': power, politics and networked urbanism I
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Room 30A, TCC, Fourth Floor

3230 Thinking the 'smart city': power, politics and networked urbanism II
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Room 30A, TCC, Fourth Floor

Friday, April 11

Monica will be presenting her research in the Nystrom Award session, part of the competition for the best paper from a recent dissertation in geography.

4111 J. Warren Nystrom Award Session 1
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Room 11, TCC, First Floor

Jen Jack Gieseking and Luke Bergmann have also organized a trio of sessions around digital geographies. While none of the sheeple will be direct participants, some UK Geographers will be participating, just for good measure.

4132 Digital Geographies, Geographies of Digitalia: Interventions into Digital Thought and Practice
8:00 AM - 9:40 AM in Room 32, TCC, Fourth Floor

4232 Digital Geographies, Geographies of Digitalia: The Digital in Place
10:00 AM - 11:40 AM in Room 32, TCC, Fourth Floor

4432 Digital Geographies, Geographies of Digitalia: Discursive Productions of Digital Space
12:40 PM - 2:20 PM in Room 32, TCC, Fourth Floor

We hope to see you all in Tampa!

New Book Chapter on the Geographies of Beer on Twitter

We're pleased to announce a new publication by members of the Floatingsheep team. Just released is "Offline Brews and Online Views: Exploring the Geography of Beer on Twitter", a new book chapter written by Matt and Ate that analyzes the geographies of beer-related tweeting activity. Published in a new edited collection from Springer appropriately- and straightforwardly-entitled The Geography of Beer, Matt and Ate's paper -- the latest in Floatingsheep's long line of investigations into the geographies of beer -- shows that geotagged tweets about beer, and other alcoholic beverages for that matter, are reflective of people's offline consumption preferences.

Using a database of one million geotagged tweets from June 2012 to May 2013 containing the keywords "wine", "beer" or the names of a range of light or cheaper beers within the continental US, some clear regional variations in alcoholic beverage preference are detected. For instance, when comparing tweets referencing "wine" to those referencing "beer", wine-related tweets tend to be more dominant along both the east and west coasts of the US. But this kind of variation is present even when comparing different brands of light beer. While Bud Light is more popular in the eastern and southeastern US, Coors Light tends to dominate the west coast, with Miller Lite and Busch Light being preferred in the midwest and Great Plains. The dominance of these brands in virtual space is no surprise, as they also dwarf the competition in actual sales.

But these regional variations are even more distinct when one looks at locally- or regionally-specific brands. While some of these cheaper (which is not to say less delicious!) beers have reached a national or even international market, others remain popular in only a very limited region, owing either to local tradition or simply limited distribution outside of their home-markets. Nonetheless, by mapping the concentrations of geotagged tweets referencing each of these brands, we're able to uncover these regional particularities, as is shown in the map below, taken from Matt and Ate's chapter.

Aggregated Geographies of Tweets referencing Regional 'Cheap' Beers

From Sam Adams in New England to Yuengling in Pennsylvania to Grain Belt and Schlitz in the upper Midwest, these beers are quite clearly associated with particular places. Other beers, like Hudepohl and Goose Island are interesting in that they stretch out from their places of origin -- Cincinnati and Chicago, respectively -- to encompass a much broader region where there tend to be fewer regionally-specific competitors, at least historically. On the other hand, beers like Lone Star, Corona and Dos Equis tend to have significant overlap in their regional preferences, with all three having some level of dominance along the US-Mexico border region, but with major competition between these brands in both Arizona and Texas.

Beer, like many other social practices, may be millennia-old, but the socio-spatial practices associated with it – checking into a brewery, posting a review, geotagging a photo – continue to evolve with technological change. As such, this kind of data provides an important way to capture these socio-spatial practices and preferences, while demonstrating how even in an era of supposed globalization and homogenization, regional histories and cultures continue to be reflected online in important ways.

If you don't have access and would like to read more about this, please contact Matt at zook [at] uky [dot] edu for a pre-publication version of the chapter. Bottoms up!

The full citation for Matt and Ate's chapter is below:

Zook, M. and A. Poorthuis. 2014. "Offline Brews and Online Views: Exploring the Geography of Beer Tweets". In The Geography of Beer, eds. M. Patterson and N. Hoalst-Pullen. Springer. pp. 201-209.

IRONSHEEP 2014: Wow. So Sheep. Such Maps.

We are happy to announce that we will be holding our third annual IronSheep geo-hackathon at this year's annual AAG conference in Tampa, Florida.

The event seeks to mimic the format of the “Iron Chef” television series and challenges participants (grouped into teams with members from diverse backgrounds and skill sets) to produce meaningful analysis and fun, evocative map mash-ups from the same sets of user-generated, geo-coded data within a four hour time frame. The goal is to provide a semi-structured environment where participants can socialize and work on a fun, yet socially meaningful project. Participants will be drawn from academic, industry and artistic communities from around the world.

Interested?  We have a larger venue (thanks to Tampa Bay Wave) this year than in years past and so encourage all to come.  We do ask, however, that you pre-register so we have an idea of attendance.

There will be prizes, there will be trophies, there will be gratuitous sheep and use of the doge meme.

Date: Tuesday April 8, 2014

Time: 5 pm to 9 pm

Location: Tampa Bay Wave (Directions from the Tampa Convention Center)

Bring: your laptop, software, friends, lovers, geographers, programmers, geo-geeks, ewes, rams and lambs

Don't bring: wolves, Chupacabra or mint sauce as we have learned last year they are hazardous (or offensive) to sheep.

We will provide food, beverages, data, internet, prizes and sparkling commentary. And perhaps even present one of the floating sheep collective as a sheep. But don't count on that last point.

How to Win--suggestions from the first season of Iron Sheep

Remembering Mandela

Coming of age as I did in the 1980s, Nelson Mandela loomed large and it was with a profound sadness that I learned of his death.  He was a revolutionary fighting against both the unjust racial system of apartheid as well as larger political and economic structures that enabled (and continue to enable) the some to exploit the many.

With his death, the world has lessened; but the dream and the work for justice remains, both in South Africa and the world.

I take comfort in this visualization of the globalness of his legacy, presently partially and imperfectly, in the animation below. Individuals from around the world sending a message containing his name, the merest flash in time-space, that when combined with others sparks, can set the world aglow.

Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika….

Tweets from December 5th and 6th 2013 containing "Mandela" 

-------- technical notes -----
- This animation represents 190,000 geocoded tweets mentioning 'mandela' sent from 14:00 December 5th to 16:00 on December 6th. Geocoded tweets are only a fraction of all tweets and so the actually number of tweets sent is likely up to 100 times more.
- The use of Twitter varies across countries and low levels of use means that some countries with large populations do no stand out in this map (e.g., China and India). This is most likely an artifact of differences in technology use as well as non-Roman alphabets rather than an indicator of interest.