A team of geo-data experts from Floatingsheep.org have used geolocated Tweets to gauge differences in culture across the US.

In honour of The Fourth of July, the analysts decided to celebrate the US' patchwork society by exploring and mapping local patterns in social media using their new geo-data project, DOLLY (Data On your Local Life and You).

For this particular exercise they counted Twitter mentions of either 'beer' or 'church' in every US county, and then assigned each a rating according to which of the two words came out on top and by what margin.

Roughly 10 million Tweets were analysed for the project, with data gathered between June 22 and 28. Almost 18,000 of these included the word 'church' and over 14,000 mentioned 'beer'.

Counties coloured in red are those where 'church' came out on top, while 'beer' Tweets won out in blue areas. The darker the shade of colour, the more dominant that word was.

White areas indicate counties where the two were roughly equal, while grey denotes missing data.

Tweets including 'beer' were most dominant in San Francisco (191, compared to 41 for 'church'), with Dallas, Texas showing the biggest margin in favour of 'church' (178 to 83).

The analysts then ran a statistical test to measure clustering between regions of similar word preference. The results of this test are shown in the second map (below).

Red areas denote counties where 'church' also dominated in neighbouring counties, while blue areas show the same for mentions of 'beer'. Click image for larger version. Photograph: Floatingsheep.org

In short, counties where 'church' came out on top tend to share borders with counties where a similar result was found, with the same true of those where 'beer' dominated.

Interestingly, the clear north/south divide in the Eastern half of the country looks remarkably similar to the red/blue divide shown in recent US presidential elections.

For more details about the project and how the data was analysed, read the authors' article here.

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