Time: Humboldt State University professor Monica Stephens and a team of researchers combined Google Map’s API with homophobic, racist and prejudiced tweets to create the “Geography of Hate” map.
Time: Humboldt State University professor Monica Stephens and a team of researchers combined Google Map’s API with homophobic, racist and prejudiced tweets to create the “Geography of Hate” map.
Creating a map like this is essentially about data plotting. In this case, HSU says the data was derived from “every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 to April 2013” that contained keywords related to hate speech. How’d HSU collect all of that Twitter data? Through DOLLY, a University of Kentucky project that maps social media according to geography, allowing researchers to then comb through the data for patterns or correlations. But what about tweets that used the keywords in a positive (that is, “critical of them”) sense? HSU’s researchers read through the tweets manually, categorizing each as positive, neutral or negative — the map only displays the tweets categorized as negative.
The map seems to show a East Coast–West Coast disparity, with a red “hot spot” near The Dalles.
