What's up with Montana? Comparing Google and Wikipedia in the US

As mentioned in an earlier post we're starting to have some fun with cartogram representations of geoweb data. For those who have forgotten, cartograms distort geographical areas based on the proportional value of some characteristic.

In the two cartograms below the characteristics used to determine size are (1) Google Maps placemarks and (2) the total number of geotagged Wikipedia articles. The distortion was done at the county level and include the 48 lower continental U.S. states. The coloration represents the relative number of geotags/placemarks by population. This gives a better understanding of the distribution of geotags/placemarks both by population and by area.

While many of the results are expected -- California is bursting with geoweb goodness no matter what the measure -- there are some intriguing differences between the distribution of wikipedia and Google Maps placemarks.

Cartogram depicting the distribution of Google Maps Placemarks

Cartogram depicting the distribution of geotagged Wikipedia articles

For example, Texas, Florida and North Carolina are bulging with placemarks but slim tremendously when you consider wikipedia entries. In contrast, New York and Vermont seem to have proportionally more wikipedia than Google Maps placemarks.

But the biggest contrast between these measures is Montana whose size balloons tremendously when you move from placemarks to wikipedia entries. We're really not sure what's going on with Montana and so invite folks to take a closer look. We suspect it has to do with someone (or perhaps some automated bots) who were/are extremely dedicated to documenting EVERYTHING in Montana. Interestingly this dedication does not extend to the neighboring states of North and South Dakota or to creating placemark entries for use in Google Maps.

Wikipedia Entries in Google Maps

In any case, these cartograms and the case of Montana highlights how diverse each digital layer within any place's cyberscape can be.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Mongo for pointing us to the page for the WikiProject Montana, where questions emanating from this blog post have uncovered that a couple of diligent Wikipedians (one of them being Mongo) have been geotagging all kinds of stuff out in the Big Sky country. So thanks for passing the info along and proving our hypothesis about the bots to be wrong!

A Gravity Sink in Wyoming? A Cartogram of Google Placemarks in the U.S.

One of the visualization techniques that we're beginning to work with are cartograms (thanks to Monica) which distort the size of an area based on some characteristic. We decided to do this with the number of Google Maps placemarks in the image below (we strongly recommend clicking on it to get the bigger version).

This cartogram helps to visualize the density of the geoweb within the U.S. although other measures such as Wikipedia entries produce fairly different images. Not all geoweb data is created equal.


This cartogram was created using the total number of placemarks at the county level so the distortion is at that scale rather than the scale of the state. This is very clear for the area of Illinois around Chicago which bulges out relative to the rest of the state. The west coastal region is another good example as is the area around Boston.

At the other end of the spectrum is the contraction in the upper mountain west and great plains. Although we recognize the power of labels and are loath to characterize regions solely based on our maps, there really seems to be a bit of informational gravity sink (aka black hole) in the center of Wyoming. Perhaps it would be best for those in the region to strap down their iPhones lest they be drawn into it.

Mapping the Bluegrass cyberscape

Although it's been quite a while since we last posted our metro-level cyberscape visualizations, we figured that now was as good a time as any to bring them back. In some of our previous posts, we mapped the total number of user-generated Google Maps placemarks in our sample cities, along with some Crescent City culture-specific maps of New Orleans for Mardi Gras and other interesting examples from around the world.

Below you'll find maps depicting the location of all user-generated placemarks (using the keyword "1") and placemarks referencing "crime" in Lexington, Kentucky. Although Lexington doesn't hold much, if any, significance for most of our readership, it presents an excellent opportunity to ground truth these virtual references by comparing them to our collective experiences as current and past residents of "the Horse Capital of the World".

All User-Generated Content in Lexington KY

User-Generated References to "Crime" in Lexington KY

In the first map, the highest concentration of placemarks exists in downtown Lexington. More specifically, the points with the most placemarks (shown in red) are at the intersection of Limestone and Main Streets, a primary intersection in the city and the site of Phoenix Park (formerly the Phoenix Hotel) and the city's courthouses.

While the spatial pattern of all user-generated content is not surprising in the least, and largely mirrors what has been seen in other urban areas, the concentration of placemarks referencing "crime" is significantly more interesting. Rather than being a mirror of the more general pattern focused on the city center, placemarks referencing crime are focused on the Kirwan-Blanding residential complex on the University of Kentucky's South Campus.

Although this concentration isn't necessarily surprising, given the fact that the Kirwan-Blanding complex has been the site of some significant violent crimes, along with almost innumerable incidents of public intoxication and drug possession, this does represent an important deviation from common patterns of concentration within city centers, as was evidenced by the map of all placemarks in Lexington.

User-Created Geographies of Religion: Allah, Buddha, Hindu, Jesus

Are there distinct geographies to religious references in user-created content indexed by Google? The following maps will demonstrate that there undoubtedly are.

User Generated References to Allah

User Generated References to Buddha

User Generated References to Hindu

User Generated References to Jesus

High rankings (in terms of specialization and absolute references) are often found in the most likely regions. For example, the Middle East, North Africa, and Muslim parts of South and Southeast Asia are all characterised by a significant amount of specialization and a large number of references to "Allah."

References to "Buddha" are similarly clustered in East and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas and Sri Lanka. The geography of references to "Hindu" is even more clustered. Here, the Indian Subcontinent, Afghanistan, Angkor Wat, Bali, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur (two cities with large Indian populations) have a large number of references.

References to "Jesus" are more broadly distributed than any of the other three terms, but still show an incredible degree of concentration. The Americas, Western Europe and the Philippines are blanketed by references to Jesus.

Unlike user generated references to sex and business, religious search terms tend to display a geographic concentration in both absolute and relative terms. Or in other words, it is interesting that sex and business are far more global in scope than even these four very global religions.

Peer produced business and sex

One of the real advantages of user generated placemarks is that there are no restrictions on the type of references that can be made. Historical references, pop culture icons and everyday minutia are all potential topics for placemarks. With this breadth in mind, we wanted to see how the common global memes of "business" and "sex" become evident via the geoweb.

In each of the following maps, the size of the black circles indicates the absolute number of references to either "sex" or "business" in user-created Google placemarks. The shading of each map represents the specialization in references to each term (each term was compared to an index of all other user-generated content).

User Generated References to Business

Sex and business clearly have distinct albeit related geographies. Not surprisingly the developed world has the largest concentration of both types of placemarks; consistent with the information inequality we've already noted.

North America, Japan and much of Europe are largely blanketed by references to business., while most of the rest of the world is characterized by far fewer virtual references. The UK and North America also have a high degree of specialization in terms of references to business, but high values are also present in non-Western countries that have strong ties to global business networks. As the largest low cost manufacturer, China shows a high degree of business specialization as does much of Central America which recently entered the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) accord. The two largest economies of sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria and South Africa) are specialized in business, as is the U.A.E. (where Dubai is located). Other countries such as Indonesia and Hungary are highly specialized as well.

User Generated References to Sex

Interestingly, references to business, are much more geographically dispersed than references to sex. Again, in absolute terms, the United States, Northern Europe and Japan have by far the most references to sex. However, when looking at specialization, intriguing patterns emerge. The United States and parts of Northern Europe (particularly the UK, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland, and for some reason the Norwegian Island of Svalbard) continue to be ranked highly.

Yet it is large parts of Africa that contain the highest degree of specialization. Or, in other words, user-generated content in countries like Nigeria, Kenya and Tunisia is far more likely to contain references to sex than user-generated content in most other places. While one would expect to see a degree of specialization in countries like the Netherlands (due to well known sex industries of Amsterdam), the amount of specialization in places like Mauritania, Zambia and Lesotho is truly surprising. It could simply be a spurious result based on the generally low number of user generated placemarks in those locations. Alternatively it suggests that "sex" may be one of the first topics in which people comment about a place and it is only later that more mainstream foci appear.

The Virtual ‘Bible Belt’

The size of the dots in this map represents the relative number of mentions of the word “church” in placemarks uploaded to Google. Results for the word “church” have been divided by the "0" and "1" baseline measure (see the last two blog posts), thus highlighting the parts of North America in which mentions of the word “church” are over- and under- represented. Interestingly, while the “bible belt” in the physical world is often talked about as being synonymous with the American South, the virtual “bible-belt” additionally incorporates large parts of the Midwest. Less surprising is the fact that the Northeast and the West have relatively low scores. The GeoWeb is in many ways a mirror (albeit a distorted one) of the physical places that it represents.

Information Inequality

Following on from the last post, here are some examples of Google placemark inequality:

First of all, China offers perhaps one of the most striking examples of regional disparities. Beijing, Shanghai, and the Pearl River Delta Region all are characterized by heavy information densities. In other words, a lot of information has been created and uploaded about these places. However, much of the rest of the country has very little cyber-presence within the Google Geoweb. In the map below, the height of each bar is an indicator the number of placemarks in each location.

The U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande river offers a similarly striking contrast between high and low information densities.

The border between North and South Korea offers another example of placemark density not being correlated to population density. For obvious reasons, very little information is being created and uploaded about North Korea. In the map below (top), each dot represents 100+ placemarks. Interestingly, there are strong similarities between the map of placemarks on the Korean Peninsula, and satellite maps of lights visible from the Peninsula at night (bottom).

image source: globalsecurity.org

Information inequalities are clearly a defining characteristic of the Geoweb. Some places are highly visible, while others remain a virtual terra incognita. In particular, Africa, South America, and large parts of Asia are being left out of the flurry of mapping that is happing online (e.g. the Tokyo/Yokohama metro region has almost three times as many 0/1 placemark hits (923,034) as the entire continent of Africa (311,770)). Some of the geographical implications of cyber-visibility and invisibility have been examined in part (e.g. here and here), but there is clearly a lot more to be discussed. In particular, because Google allows any keyword to be searched for (not only "0" and "1"), we are able to explore not only the raw amounts of information attached to each place, but also the contents of that information.

Global Placemark Intensity

The following map shows the intensity of google placemarks on a global scale. Using custom-designed software, a dataset was created based on a 1/4 degree grid of all the land mass in the world (roughly 250,000 points). For each point a search was run on the numbers “0” and “1” in order to create a baseline measure of the amount of online geo-referenced content in each place. In the below map, every place with more than 100 placemarks is highlighted with a yellow dot.

The same method was used to create a map that highlights every place on the globe containing more than 1000 placemark hits:

When compared to a map of population density (see the map below), the distinct geographies of placemarks become apparent.

Image source: NASA

These maps suggest that the GeoWeb is far from being a simple mirror of population density or human activity. Online representations of the physical world are highly concentrated in North America, Western Europe, and the more affluent parts of East Asia and Australasia. Maps displaying placemark density on regional and local scales will be explored in more detail in the next post.