Father Christmas faces the Devil and the undead in this academic research from Oxford University at mapping Google maps

You better watch out, you better not cry or the zombies might get you. It may be nearly Christmas, but that doesn't mean Santa is running the web. In parts of the US, he's on the run from both the undead and the lord of darkness. And yes, this is serious academic research.

Mark Graham and the team at the Oxford Internet Institute (who've mapped zombies, every geotagged picture on Flickr and languages used on Wikipedia) looked at key words geotagged on Google map as part of their research into the state of the internet.

Graham, who also runs the blogs floatingsheep.org and zerogeography.net worked with Monica Stephens, Taylor Shelton, and Matt Zook to look at the amount of content indexed by Google Maps at each location containing the term "Santa" and then comparing it. To zombies and Satan.

So, some places have more content referring to Santa, and others have more content mentioning "zombies," "devil," or Satan.

Says Graham:

We basically just wanted to see whether the places we live in are augmented by more Christmas-related information or more devilish/ghoulish-related information. All in the name of science of course

There's a lot of work behind this. How did they do it? The team created a dataset based on a 0.25 x 0.25 degree grid of all the land mass in the world (roughly 13,500 points).

A buffer was then constructed for each point using a sliding variable size based on the great circle distance to neighbouring points in the grid pattern. It was important to adjust this value in order to compensate for decreasing distance between longitudes as the software moves north or south. For each point and buffer combination a search was run in Google Maps to measure the total number of hits for content containing each term at each location

The resulting maps are part of the team's "mission determine the mythological and ecclesiastical contours of the Web (and of course protect all of humankind from the impending zombie apocalypse), and essentially tell us whether America is augmented by more Christmas-related information or more devilish/ghoulish-related information".

Santa v Satan

Houston, Dallas, Chicago and San Francisco all have more content referencing Satan and Zombies than Santa.

In both Texas and Florida Satan clusters are bigger than the Zombie clusters observed earlier. And the line of preoccupation with Satan remains behind eastern seaboard cities, so I guess folks from New England and the Mid-Atlantic should drive carefully and not pick up any shambling or horned hitch-hikers they may see

Devil v Santa

Satan v Zombies

Whether or not it tells us much about the web is one thing. But it does help to build up a more complex picture of the way the internet works.

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