Dr. Monica Stephens, a professor at Humboldt State University, has created a series of maps that illustrate which areas of the United States are most likely to send tweets with certain hateful words. It’s called Geography of Hate, and here’s how it works:
The data behind this map is based on every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 – April 2013 containing one of the ‘hate words’. This equated to over 150,000 tweets and was drawn from the DOLLY project based at the University of Kentucky. Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing ‘hate words’ as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.
To produce the map all tweets containing each ‘hate word’ were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county.
The heat map we’ve highlighted above tracks “chink” tweets. Users are able to zoom in, where they’ll discover, among other things, that a disproportionate number of “chink” tweets originate from central Virginia. What’s up with that?
Play around and see if you find any other trends.