Answer the question here

PORTLAND, Oregon — I call it soda, but if you’re from Minneapolis, you probably call it pop. A map of where the strongholds of pop- and soda-drinkers are in the U.S. became hugely popular last year, along with 30 other maps of geographical usage differences. Now those maps have inspired a new project that allows you to make your own map of people’s geographical differences on any word or topic you like.

It’s called The Mapossum, and that’s all it took to draw me in to a presentation about it here last month at the annual FOSS4G conference. George Raber and James Dickens of the University of Southern Mississippi (where they inexplicably call all soft drinks “coke”) explained how they built a web app that lets you ask your own question, gathers and geolocates the answers, and then generates a map of the results. You can also check out other people’s maps.



“You can come and you can just visualize questions that have been created, or you can answer questions that have been created, or you can create your own questions,” Dickens said.

FOSS4G stands for Free and Open-Source Software for Geospatial, so as you can imagine, the audience was filled with coders, GIS specialists and software engineers asking questions about things most of us don’t understand like GeoJSON, TileStache and github snippets.

But the main question in my mind was, “What should I map first?”

A million ideas later, I decided to start with the first idea I had. If this one goes well, we’ll follow up with more. But for now, help us out by letting us know which you like better: paper maps or digital maps. (And while you’re at it, flip through the rest of the questions including, “When was the last time you saw a live possum?” and “How do you use the word ‘fixing’?”