Geomapping Racism With Twitter

Hugh Pickens writes "Megan Garber writes that in the age of the quantified self, biases are just one more thing that can be measured, analyzed, and publicized. The day after Barack Obama won a second term as president of the United States, a group of geography academics took advantage of the fact that many tweets are geocoded to search Twitter for racism-revealing terms that appeared in the context of tweets that mentioned 'Obama,' 're-elected,' or 'won,' sorting the tweets according to the state they were sent from and comparing the racist tweets to the total number of geocoded tweets coming from that state during the same time period. Their findings? Alabama and Mississippi have the highest measures followed closely by Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee forming a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast. Beyond that cluster North Dakota and Utah both had relatively high scores (3.5 each), as did Missouri, Oregon, and Minnesota. 'These findings support the idea that there are some fairly strong clustering of hate tweets centered in southeastern U.S. which has a much higher rate than the national average,' writes Matthew Zook. 'But lest anyone elsewhere become too complacent, the unfortunate fact is that most states are not immune from this kind of activity. Racist behavior, particularly directed at African Americans in the U.S., is all too easy to find both offline and in information space.'"

Comments

Re:Actually Measured

[Sir_Sri]

I wouldn't publicise any findings until I'd had them peer-reviewed and published.

Then you'd never get funding for a project like this.

They're demonstrating that there might be something interesting to study, the press lets them ask for money rather than beg, and they're not all that invested in a project that might not go anywhere.

its irresponsible to be promoting the findings among people who clearly won't bother to understand

I hate to break it to you, but the press doesn't understand peer reviewed work any better. Whenever media ever looks at any academic work they completely misrepresent it. That's something you get used to.

Re:How about black-to-white racism?

[Nerdfest]

I know another term for reverse-racism ... it's "racism". It shouldn't be made different in any way. If people keep doing things to treat any type of racism differently, it will never stop.