"An Interactive Map of Racist, Homophobic and Ableist Tweets in America"

[krispos42]

[div class=excerpt style=background:#AFEEEE]This is The Geography of Hate – a cartographical collection of every geotagged tweet in the continental U.S. between June 2012 and April 2013 in which the word "chink," "gook," "nigger," "wetback," "spic," "dyke" "fag," "homo," "queer" or "cripple" was used in an explicitly negative way.

Created by the datavisualization experts at Floating Sheep, the interactive map was made in response to criticism that a previous map – which plotted the distribution of racial epithets in the wake of Obama's re-election – had arrived at specious conclusions about the relative amount of racist content emanating from Mississippi and Alabama. Via Floating Sheep:

In order to address [one such criticism] , students at Humboldt State manually read and coded the sentiment of [hundreds of thousands of tweets containing homophobic, racist, or ableist slurs] to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral manner. This allowed us to avoid using any algorithmic sentiment analysis or natural language processing, as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. For example the phrase ‘dyke’, while often negative when referring to an individual person, was also used in positive ways (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride”). The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive. Only those tweets used in an explicitly negative way are included in the map... All together, the students determined over 150,000 geotagged tweets with a hateful slur to be negative.

<more>

http://io9.com/an-interactive-map-of-racist-homophobic-and-ableist-tw-499908637



States Obama won:

[Buzz Clik]

1. Correlation to the electoal map is not very good.

The pockets of intolerance are telling, however. Some are a bit confusing. In some instances, it's areas of high minorty populations (Atlanta), but not in others (Chicago is pretty calm). Some little pockets are inexplicable from the outside.

Great map. Thanks.

[krispos42]

2. That's what I thought was interesting

I don't think it's population-density corrected, so that might be part of it.

[Buzz Clik]

3. Agreed.

But the ridge of hate down Appalachia is readily recognizable.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

4. I think it is, actually

Look at California, which is very light colored throughout, including for Los Angeles/San Diego and San Fran/Silicon Valley. Only Sacramento seems to light up a bit.
I wasn't surprised to see the Northeast Corridor light up, as my experience here is once you get outside of the liberal bastions like NYC and DC and the area around West Point - the Army is determinedly non-racist, at least officially, and it shows over there - there ain't much daylight between around here and how people might think in the rural areas of the deepest South.
I've been called epithets that aren't even accurate: "towelhead", for instance. I have been mistaken for Indian, but I'm actually Puerto Rican. It actually makes me stop and think because I have to do a translation in my head and realize this person is actually hating me for being different in a different way than he thinks.
Not that it makes much difference; they'd just have to use a different epithet.

[Gman]

5. I'm somewhat suspect of the methodology

And the statistical distributions of this because of the blue areas in West Texas. Compared to CA which shows similar shading, absolutely no one lives in West Texas. So I don't see how they could even compare statistically.

I went to the page, but I don't care enough to go further and check the methodology. It would be pretty poor work to just plot on a map that we had this many hateful comments here, this many here, etc. without correlating to the populations of the area.