A while back, I saw an article about shoes dangling over power lines in the city of Athens, Ohio. Being into rumors and urban legends, I contacted Athens’ Public Works department and asked for any GIS data they had on the shoes. They replied that they didn’t have GIS shapefiles, but they had addresses. With those addresses, I put together some maps of each sweep, which the city did at roughly six-month intervals.

Here’s an animated GIF of all 6 sweeps that they sent me, with standard deviation ellipses showing the primary concentration of shoes. The numbers are approximate at best, as many of the sweeps used “many” or “several” instead of integers. I used 10 and 5 as approximate numbers, respectively.

I’m going to be doing more maps on this topic as I integrate more data, but I just got permission from the Athens PW department to share these maps, so I’m excited to show off my work.