The U.S. according to personal ads

A person (with, apparently, way too much time on his hands), pulled personal ad descriptions with their location, then mapped the info two ways.

A more perfect union

First, he picked certain keywords and colored the U.S. based on the frequency of the keyword (divided by congressional districts).

Then he took each state map, and replaced most of the city names with the most common word from the personal ads in that city. He also did this for some cities, down to the neighborhood level.

Amusing things I’ve found - Fort Worth is “Loving” while Dallas is “Symphony” Also, Salt Lake City is “Mormon” (which is obvious), but right below SLC is “Flaming” And in NYC, you can tell where the ethnic neighborhoods are.
His state/city interface doesn’t work worth anything, but you can look at the actual jpegs. On the left side, at the very bottom of the second box, you might be able to see the text. I can’t on IE, but I could on Firefox. However, I know where it is, so I click on the debris at the very bottom of the box.

When I click on your link, I see a very pretty fuschia map of the US - is there supposed to be something else there?

The words

A MORE PERFECT UNION
R. LUKE DUBOIS
NATIONAL MAPS
STATE AND CITY MAPS
ESSAY
PRESS
lukedubois.com

are links. Still, it’s not a user friendly site at all.

Yes, click on National maps.

Pretty interesting… I think I will have to puzzle over it a bit before commenting. My towns word was somewhere between pooch and pepsi. :eek:

I noticed the anal map seems to have a lot of brown in it.

Seriously.

There should be a scroll bar to the right of that map (not, of course, all the way to the right, that would be too obvious).

Oddly enough, I can’t get to the site from work anymore. It appears to be blocked. I was able to get to it last Friday. :confused:

Ah, okay, I clicked on the links - still not making much sense to me. Sorry, I think this site is a fail. :slight_smile:

I kind of like what he’s trying to do here, but his red/blue/violet color scale is awful and incomprehensible.

Agreed. I like most of those colors by themselves, but all together like that makes me vaguely nauseous. :frowning:

Petersburg, VA’s word is “Nigeria.” Heh.

And Annandale’s is “Spy.”

I have to click “Download full map” in the bottom left of each page to view it separately.

Hometown: Bilingual
Current city: Gambling
Other places I’ve lived: Disintegrated, profuse, effete…

Some of the weird ones seem to be things like local business names. And of course the sex ones.

Some weird things going on…

Conservative
Dictatorship
Stabber :eek:
Racist
Abusing
Binoculars (??)
Roadway
Dialysis

What some odd folks!

That’s pretty much what I have to do.

In Texas and a couple of others, there are also the religious ones.

I want to see the map of “Living life to its fullest”.

The north side of the Twin Cities has murder.

At least I can direct link to specific state maps.

Utah & Colorado

Check out the small road at the very top of Utah