Which Way Are You Facing?

I found this project very, very interesting.   It provides a way to quantify certain underlying divisions that I've always felt and heard discussed.    Certain states or regions have not only a location in the U.S., but an orientation:   that is, the people there think of themselves as connected with certain other locations.

Here's a link to the big map of new "states", but be sure to check out the interactive map as well.   It lets you see, comparatively, how much time your county spends on the phone with each county in the country.   All sorts of interesting connections emerge.   One I noticed was that on the phone, Alabama is not closely connected with Mississippi.   Over text-messaging, however, it shifts alignment away from Georgia and toward MS.   This fits well with my own anecdotal observations that younger people in Alabama have more interaction with Mississippi (especially the coast) than older people.

Large, publicly-available data-sets are going to start showing us a lot more about ourselves as we go forward.

ht: Strange Maps; Adam Brown