As expected, President Obama's re-election opened a Pandora's Box of racism, even though one had already been open since his first term began. Naturally, people took to Twitter to sound off. A group of technologically skilled geographers known as Floating Sheep tried to pinpoint where all of the racist tweets came from. The day after the Election, they searched tweets with the words "monkey," "nigger," "Obama," "reelected" and "won." Then, they isolated those that were geotagged with a location.

Next, they created a formula to determine how the state level number of hate tweets compared to the national level. The end result was the map you see above, and the greener the state, the greater the volume of racist tweets. In a shocking turn, most of that green comes from the south.

Floating Sheep mentioned two issues. First, their data showed where the tweet was sent from, not where the Twitter user is from. Second, it counts tweets as opposed to Twitter users. The other obvious issue is that, as Gawker mentioned, we can't be sure of the context of the keywords searched. Still, are we surprised at the results?

[via Gawker]

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