SheepCamp 2012: Taylor Shelton on User-Generated Political Geographies

Taylor Shelton's talk, From Online Politics to User-Generated Political Geographies, explores how the geoweb is broadening the kinds of online political action that can take place, in particular the idea that geotagging is a means through which it is possible to more directly engage with particular places.

SheepCamp 2012, Taylor Shelton from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

On Twitter: @jts_geo

Mapping Cyberscapes of the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary

They've given us gems like "I like being able to fire people", suggesting that we replace professional janitors with dozens of children from working-class homes in order to cut costs. And a bunch of other crazy inventive stuff. In an indirect way, they've also given us new vocabulary words, parodies and re-interpretations. They've also provided the raw material necessary for a range of user-generated, web 2.0, prosumptive behavior. So even though you may be a little bit frightened, you should also thank them -- albeit not necessarily with your vote.

But with the Republican presidential primaries already well underway (and today being the Florida primary), we thought it a good time to dig a bit deeper than the superficial soundbites coming from the candidates. So in this post we're understanding the geography of these candidates via pythagoric numerology and haruspicy. Ha! Just kidding, we will be looking at the distribution of geotagged online content like always. After all that's the whole point of the blog and something we've done previously for European political leaders, as well as the 2010 election in the UK and the 2008 US Presidential election. Just sometimes we dream about a change....

So what are the geographies of the 2012 GOP primary like? Is it possible for these cyberscapes to help us predict election outcomes? Are they total hogwash? Just pretty colors?
Mapping references to each of the original eight GOP contenders, one sees that the two current front runners for the nomination, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, actually have very few references relative to the other candidates. It seems evident then that these cyberscapes show a lesser degree of differentiation between candidates than is evident in the primary results thusfar.

One of the clearest patterns is the plethora of references to Rick Perry across his home state and the very few outside of Texas. Given Texas' minimal influence on the nomination process, it's likely that he now wishes he was from Iowa. There is a similar, albeit much smaller, pocket of references to Jon Huntsman in his home of Salt Lake City, while Minnesota has a cluster of references to US Representative Michele Bachmann.

But most evident is the vast swath of territory, with no real conformity to political borders, that is dominated by references to Ron Paul. Libertarians are everywhere! It's nice that the federally funded national highway system is there to help speed their movement!

Even removing the candidates that have now dropped out of the race, Ron Paul's dominance in the cyberscape of the Republican primary field is evident. While Paul's prevalence in geocoded references isn't reflected in the polling numbers in the real election, it isn't entirely surprising. As we saw over two years ago with Barack Obama's disproportionate prominence in Google Maps content, Ron Paul's prominence online is certainly a reflection of his campaign's use of the internet as a primary organizing tool.

But since the electoral system in the US is really so dependent upon what happens at the state-level we thought it worthwhile to stray from our usual method of measuring cyberscapes on a more flexible, point-by-point basis and instead aggregate references on a state-by-state basis [1].
It doesn't seem, however, to make much of a difference in the relative visibility of the different candidates. Ron Paul's seeming dominance over the virtual landscape remains a fact, while Mitt Romney wins only his home state of Massachusetts as well as Utah and Alabama and Gingrich winning just his home state of Georgia. Santorum's "win" in Oregon is primarily due to his "Google problem", with numerous references to the alternative meaning in Eugene [2].

So, if one were to use this map as a prediction of victories in GOP primaries, Ron Paul would easily be the next Republican presidential candidate. Indeed, according to references alone, Ron Paul would have won each of the three primaries that have already taken place (of which he actually won zero).

This aptly highlights the difference between online activism and offline activism. Not that we really needed a reminder after all the protest events of last year. Moreover it will be some time (thank goodness!) before Google Maps can be used to predict presidential elections. Although we're sure that someone is developing an app as we speak.

But one thing is clear, based on these maps we feel that there despite his love of conspiracy theories about the New World Order, Ron Paul might actually be the one controlling the internet.

---------------

[1] States shaded grey are representative of no clear "winner" in the number of geocoded references to the candidates. Either there were no references to the candidates' names or at least two candidates were tied for the greatest number of references -- essentially the same reasoning as the many points with no dots on the other maps above.
[2] Which brings up the role of Google and code in how places are represented online.

New Article on Wikileaks Published in Antipode

For those interested in Wikileaks, a new publication (co-authored with Sue Roberts and Anna Secor) based on the Wikileaks mapping we did in December 2010 is now available. Drop me a line if you don't have library access.

Critical Infrastructure: Mapping the Leaky Plumbing of US Hegemony
by Sue Roberts, Anna Secor, Matthew Zook
Antipode Volume 44, Issue 1, pages 5–9, January 2012

Geopolitical mappings of the world can say as much about the vulnerabilities of hegemony as about aspirations to power. Mappings of US geostrategic interests are no exception. Recent national security priorities, the details of which were revealed in leaked diplomatic cables, include the identification of sites around the world deemed critical to the US (US Department of State 2009). From beaches where trans-oceanic cables emerge, to factories making vaccines, to maritime routes and ports, sites of particular vulnerability are assembled. The cartographic effect of this assemblage is a partial and highly distributed mapping of the fragile material underpinnings of US power.

Measuring Politicians' Popularity in Google Maps Placemarks

Mapping the relative popularity of different politicians is old hat to the Floatingsheep collective -- our map comparing references to Barack Obama and John McCain was one of the first maps ever featured on the site (and the first that Taylor made!). A much more aesthetically advanced version of that map has now published in the Atlas of the 2008 Elections, edited by fellow Kentucky geographer Stan Brunn and a bevy of others. To honor that publication, as well as to acknowledge the ballyhoo these days about the role of digital technologies in promoting social and political change across the globe, more analysis seems timely. We now broaden the geographic extent of our earlier map and present the following, showing the relative prevalence of references to the names of political leaders in eight major countries in Europe and North America.

Politicians' Placemark Popularity

As is par for the course around here, each color dot represents more references in that location to the name of that politician than to each of the other seven. In other words, a purple dot means that there are more references to Barack Obama than to Angela Merkel, David Cameron, etc. It should also be noted that the keywords used for this comparison are the full names of each politician, rather than simply a last name.

Politician's Popularity in Europe

When focusing on Europe, the map almost perfectly shows that references to the name of a political leader are likely to predominate in the country that politician represents. England is awash in the burnt orange color symbolizing David Cameron, Spain in brown for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, France in the pink of Nicolas Sarkozy, the silver of Silvio Berlusconi covering Italy, the blue-green of Angela Merkel filling the borders of Germany, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's yellow in Turkey and the green of Dmitry Medvedev scattered across Russia, however concentrated in the west. In this sense, the map conveys a relatively simple point that we've been spending quite some time trying to reiterate: the internet, and thus the data within it, is not somehow disconnected from geography. Instead, the two are very much intertwined, with digital representations of place being very much tied to the characteristics of that place, including its politics.

Where this map gets interesting, however, is when one looks away from Europe, especially returning to the United States (see the first map above). One may expect a veritable blanket of purple, symbolizing Obama, to cover the country in much the same way as the references to other political leaders did in their home countries. It is instead a potpourri of colors, with each of the other politicians dominating in one place or another. Whether this has to do with Obama's declining popularity or something else, we are unsure.

Given that all of the other countries included in this map, with the exception of Russia, are relatively small in terms of area, there may be a negative correlation between the areal extent of the country and the likelihood of complete homogeneity in Google Maps references. It is surprising, however, how much this deviates from Obama's dominance when compared to John McCain in 2008, as reflected in our Presidential Placemark Poll map. Maybe this is just evidence of an evil Obama plot to sell off America's virtual territory to socialist (and not-so-socialist) Europeans?

As always, our speculation usually leads us to a dead end, to which we have now arrived. Let the digital jockeying for territorial dominance commence!

The Power of Google Maps

Hardly a week goes by without there being some flare up about how a disputed border represented in Google Maps leads to real world consequences. Whether it was the Chinese labelling of place names in Arunachal Pradesh, or the recent confrontation over a mis-drawn border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica leading to an 'invasion', Google Maps has found itself at the center of some touchy geopolitical disputes.

We're not the first ones to mention these disputes. Indeed, we rarely (and belatedly), if ever, comment on them. But because of the persistence of news stories on this topic, we're compelled to comment on the broader implications of what John Gravois, in his interesting Washington Monthly piece 'The Agnostic Cartographer', points to as the problem of Google's attempts at ambivalence when such disputes arise. The official Google policy is to avoid culpability in such disputes by relying on previous international conventions and providing multiple representations of places in order to placate both sides of a potential conflict. But what do these attempts at neutrality accomplish?

Ultimately, Google's ambivalence serves to further obfuscate, and reinforce, the power of their maps. As J.B. Harley so astutely pointed out over twenty years ago, "Much of the power of the map, as a representation of social geography, is that it operates behind a mask of a seemingly neutral science. It hides and denies its social dimensions at the same time as it legitimates" (Harley 1989: 7). So by attempting to withdraw from "some of the world's touchiest geopolitical disputes", Google is at once depoliticizing and further extending the influence of their maps, as Gravois points out in his article. But, as Harley asserts, "the map is never neutral" (14) -- so why attempt to make it seem that way?

The point being, just because Google Maps are produced and used somewhat differently than the hand-drawn maps of old, does not somehow mean that the nature of the map is fundamentally different and that the corpus of theory built up around critical cartography is no longer relevant. Indeed, the same ideas apply quite nicely to both traditional, expert-oriented cartography and what has become known as 'neogeography' or 'volunteered geographic information'.

These issues and ideas seem to have been lost in all of the popular debate about Google and geopolitics, even in excellent summaries such as Gravois'. Maps, in whatever form they may take, remain important reflections of the world, albeit reflections of a particular, limited worldview and set of interests (in the case of Google, the interest in minimizing conflict and maximizing profits) that should not be ignored. At the same time, however, maps also have a powerful role in shaping the world in which we live; a role that arguably should not be left to giant corporations or powerful governments.

Further reading:

• Crampton, Jeremy and John Krygier. 2005. "An Introduction to Critical Cartography". ACME: An International e-Journal for Critical Geographies 4(1):11-33.
• Harley, J.B. 1989. "Deconstructing the map". Cartographica 26(2):1-20.
• Wood, Denis. 1992. The Power of Maps. The Guilford Press.

The Political Economy of Search and Space

There was an interesting piece in the Guardian recently by Micah White with the provocative title, "Google is polluting the internet". (Thanks to Martin Dodge who sent it to me.) It basically comes down to an analysis of the political economy of knowledge classification in the age of Google searching. How do we relate things together? And most crucially, how does advertising (Google's revenue source) influence what we find and what we chose to pursue?

Food for thought and similar to many of the issues that we regularly raise here in regards to how sorting of maps (including advertisements) shapes our understanding of places. We generally think of ourselves as sophisticated users of technologies but we are not immune; advertising links on our smartphones have changed our decisions about where to go.

There is no one right answer to how to search and map, just as there is not one truly representational map. The decisions that are made are necessary for things to work but they are decisions rather than simply value-neutral operations and warrant thoughtful consideration. As this article notes, "There is no system for organising knowledge that does not carry with it social, political and cultural consequences. Nor is an entirely unbiased organising principle possible. The trouble is that too few people realise this today. We've grown complacent as researchers; lazy as thinkers. We place too much trust in one company, a corporate advertising agency, and a single way of organising knowledge, automated keyword indexing."

Introna and Nissenbaum have a good article on this for those who are interested (see below). I'd welcome any other suggestions as well.

Introna and Nissenbaum 'Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters' (The Information Society, 16(3):1-17, 2000)

Mapping the Tea Party Movement Online

Since Sarah Palin was recently talking about our blog on cable news shows, we decided it was only fair to map out her so-called tea-party movement.



It is interesting that the West Coast and the northeast of the country have some of the highest relative and total hits for the tea party. Perhaps this refudiates the claim that these are less pro-America parts of the nation. Or, depending upon your point of view, it may confirm that the coasts are out to destroy the country.

Also the patterns we see in the above slice of cyberscape, represented by data drawn from Google Maps, is matched by another slice of cyberscape drawn from Twitter. A presentation by Pete Skomoroch, Kevin Weil, and Sean Gorman shows the distribution of tweets with the term tea party. It shows Lady Gaga, as well, if you're curious (check out slide 68).


We should also point out that just because you can't see Russia on these maps is no reason to misunderestimate them. There's also a distinct possibility that we're missing out on a whole slew of geotagged data due to the misspelling of fairly simple words.

Liberal, conservative and the Kansas surprise

Liberal or conservative?

To any critical thinker, such a question should seem reductionist. And, well, it is. But since it's incredibly hard (nee impossible!) to map an entire world worth of possibilities, we should just embrace the nature of the map and all of its reductionist tendencies and get on with it.

When comparing and visualizing virtual references to "conservative" and "liberal" in the Google Maps database, one ends up with a map like the one seen above. But what does it mean? What do "conservative" and "liberal" even mean?

The short answer is, well, a lot of things. For one, contrasting these terms is extremely problematic because it excludes such a wide range of alternative political views that lie either between or outside of this dyad. Second, the question of locality is important, as the political meanings of liberal and conservative are often subject to place-specific interpretations, not to mention the projection of personal preference. Indeed, it could be easily argued that many 'conservatives' in the western world actually adhere to liberal political philosophy, broadly writ. And we don't even need to start with the debate that what most Americans call liberal would be considered right-of-center in many parts of the world.

Even assigning the colors red or blue to each term is problematic, as each color is interpreted differently in different countries. For instance, in the USA, red is associated with the conservative Republican party while blue is the color of the more liberal Democratic party. In the UK, however, red is the color of the left-of-center Labour party and blue the color of the Conservative party. And don't forget the reason "red" is also a noun.

The contrast between the U.S. and Europe is striking. With the exception of the UK and Italy, Europe contains many more references to liberal than conservative in its geoweb. Standard linguistic and spellings issues apply for non-English speaking countries but nevertheless the differences are intriguing and correspond to expectations, i.e., on the whole Europe has a more "liberal" political bent the U.S.

What is unexpected is the big blog of "liberal" references right in the middle of the U.S. Taking a close look, this cluster conforms perfectly the the border of the state of Kansas, a state known for its conservative shift over the past decades. Color us confused. We're hard pressed to come up with a solid hypothesis as to what's going on here so we'll suggest a couple more off the wall ones.

• Kansas is the liberal equivalent to Dick Cheney's "secure location";
• In Kansas slang, political terms are used interchangably with the name of drinks and other bar food, e.g., Hey Bartender, give me a glass of liberal (beer) with a Jacobite (whiskey) chaser and a bowl of socio-anarchism (peanuts);
  
• Kansas just happens to have a particularly fervent desire to use the word liberal in as derogatory a way as possible in Google Maps;
  
• There is a big conspiracy to virtually colonize the political cyberscape of Kansas.
  

Where's Glenn Beck with all of his ridiculous charts when you actually need him?

UK election cyberscapes

In anticipation of the upcoming election in the UK, we have decided to explore the geographies of election-related references in the British Isles. The map below visualises which of five political parties contain the most references at any particular location in the Google Maps database.

References to UK Political Parties

First, a brief note on method. We searched for the three major political parties (Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats) at each location, as well as two of the parties on the far-right of the political spectrum (UKIP and the BNP) that have made gains in recent years. We also searched for the terms "tories + election" and "lib dems + election" and assigned a dot to either the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats if either one of those terms had the most hits at any location.

The map reveals some interesting online political geographies. The Tories score better than any other party. In fact, 61% of locations possess more references to the Conservatives than any other political party, whereas 33.8% of places have more references to Labour and only 3.4% for the Lib Dems.

The UKIP has a particuarly strong showing in the South West, with multiple points that contain more references to "UKIP" than any other party. The BNP do best in South Wales, West Gloucestershire, West Yorkshire and South Tyneside.

One of the most interesting aspects of the map is the degree to which it diverges from maps of likely voting patterns of constituencies. Some of the differences can likely be explained by the relatively recent boost in the polls to the Liberal Democrats (which hasn't yet had a chance to be reflected in material indexed by Google Maps). The strong showing by the Tories could also perhaps be attributed to a greater degree of online engagement by that party.

Another way of gauging online popularity of political parties before the election is to search for the names of each party leader throughout the country. Here we again chose the leaders of the three main parties, as well as Nick Griffin (BNP) in order to explore whether this method can tell us anything about the popularity of the far-right in different parts of the country. The map below shows these results.

References to UK Political Party Leaders

Here we see that Labour's Gordon Brown outperforms his rivals in almost every part of the country, a fact that likely owes much to his current position as Prime Minister. The only significant anomaly seems to be a large number of references to David Cameron in Oxfordshire. Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems again show poorly in this map, although it will be interesting to see how the online visibility of these figures changes after the election.

References to Nick Griffin unsurprisingly appear in many of the same places in which there was also a great deal of visibility for the BNP. We explore the visibility of far-right parties in some more detail through the following maps, which display total number of references to the BNP and the UKIP (this time not compared to any of the other political parties).

References to the British National Party

References to the UK Independence Party

These maps seem to indicate that there is not always a greater total number of references to the BNP or UKIP in places in which they scored highly in the first two maps. In some places, such as West Gloucestershire, it could simply be that there are fewer online references to any of the mainstream political parties.

Are these maps predictors of election results and likely voting patters? We doubt it, but it is nonetheless interesting to observe the very unique geographies occupied on the Internet by different segments of the political spectrum. We will, however, claim any credit for correctly predicting an election result of 61% Tories, 33% Labour and 3% Lib Dems.

Political Cyberscapes III: Neoliberalism and Capitalism

This is a short post because we've all been busy conferencing this week. (Apologies to those who are cringing at the use of a perfectly good noun as a verb.) Following up on an earlier post on communism, capitalism and socialism and another on Democracy and Dictatorship we're taking a quick look at the distribution of references to neoliberalism and capitalism in the European context.

In the global map it is quite striking the high relative numbers of references to neoliberal in South America which corresponds well to the strong presence of neoliberal discourse (both promoting and critiquing it) there. Argentina (and its associated financial crisis) scores highly as does Venezuela with it anti-neoliberal President Hugh Chavez. Ghana in West Africa also stands out strongly.

References to Neoliberal Worldwide

Although we already mapped capitalism, we thought it worth while zooming into the European level given the clear divide between the formerly communist East and Western Europe. Also intriguing arethe high scores achieved by the three Baltic states, Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics as well as Belgium's relative low score compared to its surrounding neighbors. We'll spare you the Belgium jokes for now.....

References to Capitalism in Europe

Political Cyberscapes II: Capitalism, Communism and Socialism

Following the first part of this series of maps on political cyberscapes, we now turn to mapping the keywords "capitalism", "communism" and "socialism" as they appear in Google Maps placemarks. The goal of this analysis is to see whether or not these references correspond to the world's political economic realities in the same way that previous maps of online references were closely tied to the offline world.

References to "Capitalism"

References to "capitalism" in Google Maps placemarks correspond closely to our expectations. Although most countries could be classified as capitalist (of one degree or another), the term is most closely associated with the capitalist countries of North American and western Europe. The highest relative concentration of references to capitalism exists in both the United States and Canada, with most of the European Union coming in with slightly fewer references. Interesting, however, is that other successful capitalist countries, like Japan and Australia, do not score highly with this measure.

References to "Communism"

The geography of references to "communism" highlights many countries with strong associations to it. For example, the communist states of Cuba, Turkmenistan and Laos are all of the highest classification while Vietnam, the Baltic states forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union, a number of other former Soviet republics within Central Asia and Croatia formerly part of the communist state of Yugoslavia. While the absence of both China and North Korea on this map is somewhat perplexing, this is likely tied to our use of English search terms. (This issue is equally evident in the below map of the term "socialism".)

The places with the highest concentrations of references to "socialism" are, like references to "capitalism" and "communism", mostly what one would expect; Cuba, Libya, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, and Vietnam all score highly in this measure. Likewise, within the South American region, Venezuela (home to the outspoken and left-leaning Hugo Chavez) exhibits the most relative references to socialism. Interestingly the distribution of references to socialism is more dispersed than references to communism which corresponds to the offline situation as well.

References to "Socialism"

The relatively high number of references to "socialism" within the U.S. is a bit perplexing, as the U.S. has a long history of anti-socialist rhetoric. Although we do not know the specific context of each of these placemarks, we do note that over the past two years, the policy programs (e.g., health care) of the Obama administration have been heavily (and incorrectly) critiqued by the right wing as being socialist. It seems likely then that some of these references may be associated, albeit in a negative manner, with President Obama and his policies.

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 many guns of urban America

God and guns keep us strong
That's what this country was founded on
Well we might as well give up and run
If we let them take our God and guns
-Lynyrd Skynyrd, "God and Guns"

As we have shown in earlier maps (here and here) guns have become a central fixture of the American landscape.

And often proponents of the Second Amendment are associated with a predominantly rural, religious and conservative population as exemplified by the above song lyric. Whether or not this is because rural Americans are 'bitter', the stereotype remains pervasive. However, when we map the number of user-generated Google Maps placemarks mentioning the word "gun", a much different pattern emerges.

Absolute Number of Guns in User-Generated Placemarks

Although the smaller dots peppered throughout the rural United States certainly show that guns maintain a presence in the rural landscape, the highest concentrations of guns in user-generated placemarks are undoubtedly found in the nation's urban centers.

Relative Specialization in Guns in User-Generated Placemarks

By focusing instead on those places with a higher-than-average number of placemarks with the word "gun", the concentration in urban areas becomes more obvious - rural areas are all but wiped off the map of indexed values. A plausible explanation would simply say that the prevalence of guns is more a function of population (more references to guns because there are more people) than of a stylized cultural trait.

Or could the differences in user-generated content been explained, at least in part, by a digital divide between urban and rural Americans? For example, rural Americans could simply be too busy actually using their guns to worry about adding user-generated placemarks to Google Maps? We should also note that the meaning of a reference to the word "gun" in a placemark is not straightforward. In other words, it could be a protest against guns or, alternatively, an affirmation of them.

Unfortunately, we end with an entirely new set of questions and are left clinging to conjecture, just as much of America remains clinging to their guns.

Visualizing the abortion debate

Abortion is a hotly contested political issue in the United States, as it has been since even before the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Regardless of one's position on the matter, the ongoing debate often lends itself to hyperbole, obscuring the observable facts.In this visualization, the difference between the number of abortion alternatives and abortion providers listed in the Google Maps directory is mapped across the US in quarter degree intervals. The greatest difference in favor of abortion providers is found in New York City, with Los Angeles and Seattle representing a similarly disproportionate number of abortion providers. Similar to some previous maps we've published, this concentration of abortion providers has a strong urban bias. However, there are many cities such as Atlanta, Dallas and Cincinnati which have more abortion alternatives than providers while some rural areas such as upstate New York and Maine have more providers.

Overall, the blue coverage across the United States shows that, in a vast majority of the country, abortion alternatives are much easier to find than abortion providers. So while the "pro-life" camp ended up on the wrong side of the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, they have built a significant organizational infrastructure which can be leveraged to promote their cause, while "pro-choice" advocates remain concentrated primarily in the nation's more politically progressive urban centers.

Where in the world is Barack Obama? (and John McCain, too!)

To follow up on our previous map showing the difference in the number of mentions between Barack Obama and John McCain in user-generated Google Maps content prior to the 2008 US Presidential Election, we figured an alternative visualization might be beneficial. The following maps represent the absolute number of mentions of Obama and McCain, respectively, in user-generated placemarks, a disaggregation of the map in our previous post.
This map, much like the previous iteration, shows the vast concentration of user-generated placemarks mentioning Obama in the nation's urban centers. The nation's largest cities - New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago - all appear prominently in this map. Although many of the notable points in both the Obama and McCain maps can be attributed to the large populations (and thus, presumably, a greater level of connectedness), a number of other explanations remain necessary. Despite being the 3rd largest city in the United States, Chicago is also the home of Barack Obama, and it houses the highest concentration of placemarks that mention his name. Significant events also seem assert their presence spatially, as Denver, Colorado, the site of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, is another relatively well-represented area, along with Portland, Oregon, where 70000+ rallied for Obama in May 2008.
Mirroring the already established pattern of urban primacy, much of McCain's presence is concentrated in the nation's urban centers, again including both New York City and the Washington, DC metro area (where McCain has the highest concentration). Unlike Obama, the places McCain is best represented in Google Maps were not necessarily the places he fared the best during either the primary or general election. For example, both Iowa and Michigan, in which McCain receives a nearly uniform number of mentions across the state, voted against him in both the primary and general elections.

Despite some of these patterns of user-generated content merely confirming the primacy of urban areas in virtual representations of the material world, others depart significantly from the predicted spatial clustering. Some areas that voted for McCain feature more prominently in the user-generated representations for Barack Obama, and vice versa, with the number of mentions for Barack Obama being more than double the number of mentions for John McCain. Although not all of the patterns displayed can be easily attributed to a particular causal factor, they only further complicate the relational geographies of the virtual and material world.

Google Mapping the 2008 US Presidential Election

Despite being highly contentious, the 2008 US Presidential Election resulted in an overwhelming electoral college victory by President Barack Obama. This map shows the difference in the number of mentions of Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain in user-generated placemarks indexed by Google. This peer-produced representation is remarkably similar to more official cartographic representations of the final election results, with a couple of notable exceptions.

Because placemark concentration is correlated with large urban populations, even the states that overwhelmingly voted for Senator McCain seem to favor Obama. This concentration of placemarks in urban areas show a significant advantage for Obama, mirroring his successes during the election. Another anomaly is the red clustering in New Hampshire, a state in which Obama defeated McCain 54%-45%. However, this cluster can be explained by McCain's momentum-building primary win in the Granite State, which eventually propelled him on to the GOP nomination.

Following J.B. Harley (1988), we should also take interest in the silences of this map. Here the primarily rural areas contain either no user-generated placemark information or an equal number of mentions for both Obama and McCain, but nonetheless appear uniformly devoid of content.