An interactive map released days ago by a Humboldt State University (HSU) assistant professor and her undergraduate student assistants reveals a “geography of hate” based on offensive tweets collected following President Obama’s 2012 re-election. The map, put together by datavisualization experts at Floating Sheep, uses a heat map format to measure the frequency of “hateful tweets,” as defined by the researchers, around America.
HSU assistant professor Dr. Monica Stephens and a group of three undergraduates collected and individually read through over 150,000 tweets to collect data. As they read, they not only paid attention to key hate words that were often racist or homophobic in nature, but they also determined whether the tweets employed those keywords in a positive, negative, or neutral manner.
The result? A higher concentration of “hateful” tweets in the Midwest and the South, and individual pockets that had a markedly higher frequency of hate tweets.
The interactive map can be found here, and more information about the study can be found on Floating Sheep’s site.