| Finally, we can put to rest the eternal question: which counties in America tweet more about church, and which tweet more about beer?
Floating Sheep ran the analysis as part of their DOLLY project, which integrates and maps geographic social media and official data sources. They're building on a database that they've been using since December 2011 to process every geocoded tweet worldwide (about 5 million per day) with the goal of making it much more user-friendly. And it produces some pretty interesting (though perhaps not surprising) results:
East Texas is clearly pretty church-y, while West Texas likes their beer a bit more. Travis county is naturally far in the camp of Team Beer. Rest assured that Lavaca County, home to Shiner, also provides many more tweets about beer than about church.
Nationally, San Francisco wins the prize for beer-to-church ratio. On the other hand, Texas gains some national recognition in the opposite direction: "Dallas, Texas wins the FloatingSheep award for most geotagged tweets about 'church' with 178, compared to only 83 about 'beer.'"
Just a couple states - Nevada and Massachusetts - are entirely in the beer camp, meaning not a single county prefers the topic of church to beer. On the other hand, there are no states made up entirely of counties tweeting more about church (though the Deep South comes in close).
It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine how this map might look with other pairings for words for the content analysis - Magic Mike vs. Jesus, anyone? In any case, on the whole, though, it's clear that most of America has more to say about beer than about church. |
