Possibly interesting maps...

[leviramsey]

Probably more obvious than interesting, though...

[The_Rev]

[mjmooney]

In that football map, sure the US usage of "football" should be discounted? They are referring to a different game.

And whatever happened to "Calcio"?

[Mr_Dogg]

In that football map, sure the US usage of "football" should be discounted? They are referring to a different game.

And whatever happened to "Calcio"?

It also has a legend for soccer though.

[mjmooney]

In that football map, sure the US usage of "football" should be discounted? They are referring to a different game.

And whatever happened to "Calcio"?

It also has a legend for soccer though.

That's what I was trying to ascertain.

Everywhere else, it's showing the likelihood of the game that Aston Villa plays being called either "football" or something different.

But is that what the US map is showing? I don't think so, otherwise it would be covered in "soccer" dots. The "football" dots on that part of the map only are surely referring to the gridiron game.

[LondonLax]

In that football map, sure the US usage of "football" should be discounted? They are referring to a different game.

And whatever happened to "Calcio"?

It also has a legend for soccer though.

That's what I was trying to ascertain.

Everywhere else, it's showing the likelihood of the game that Aston Villa plays being called either "football" or something different.

But is that what the US map is showing? I don't think so, otherwise it would be covered in "soccer" dots. The "football" dots on that part of the map only are surely referring to the gridiron game.

And in New Zealand and Australia the green dots will be refering to Rugby or AFL.

[limpid]

The game maps - I wonder how it would scale to EVE online?

[leviramsey]

In that football map, sure the US usage of "football" should be discounted? They are referring to a different game.

And whatever happened to "Calcio"?

Floating Sheep"]

On Monday we created a map illustrating the geography of virtual references to the words "football" and "soccer". In today's post, we've added eight more languages into the mix: German, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Chinese. The map below visualizes which of these various ways of referring to "football" are most visible at any particular location in the Google Maps database.

What struck us most was how the map reproduces expected patterns (based on language groups) with very few exceptions: most points in Korea reference the Korean word for football more than the same word in any other language. The same thing is true in Japan, Thailand, Brazil/Portugal and every other country associated with the languages that we conducted this batch of searches in.

Ultimately, Australia wins the prize for having the most homogeneous footballing cyberscape. There is only one place in the country with a reference to football in a language other than English: A reference to Fussball (German) somewhere around the vicinity of Alpine National Park in Victoria. Perhaps there is some sort of odd colony of football playing Germans (is there any other kind?) in this National Park (would any Aussie readers mind checking up on this for us?).

Sweden and Poland are interesting cases: a diverse mix of references to the sport in English (both "football" and "soccer"), German and Spanish, with a small smattering of Dutch and Portuguese. Of course, if we had searched in Swedish or Polish the results would likely have been otherwise.

English appears to be the dominant language for references to the sport in most parts of the world with no direct connection to one of the languages in which we conducted the search (e.g. in Iran, Finland and Russia). We should also point out the the French word for football is "football," so it is difficult to distinguish between references made in English and French using this keyword.

This map is about more than just a sport. We are interested in using this method to study and map cyberscapes in a range of languages. This map was just a first step to test some of the boundaries of the method. We will eventually be mapping a range of other terms in a lot more languages in the near future. Suggestions are welcome.

p.s. This may be a dagger in the heart of many calcio loving Italians, but despite having won the World Cup four times we simply forgot to do a search in your language. Ci scusiamo. We don't know what we were thinking.

[leviramsey]

Via similar methodology of the football map:

Are these maps predictors of election results and likely voting patters? We doubt it, but it is nonetheless interesting to observe the very unique geographies occupied on the Internet by different segments of the political spectrum. We will, however, claim any credit for correctly predicting an election result of 61% Tories, 33% Labour and 3% Lib Dems.

[Mr_Dogg]

The Labour party are encroaching on Donegal!

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

SDLP that'd be I guess.

[Anthony]

[Anthony]

[mjmooney]

I really like that Tube map, but is there any particular rationale behind it?

EDIT: Forget it, I've just realised it's anagrams.

[drat01]

I really like that Tube map, but is there any particular rationale behind it?

anagrams ?

[mjmooney]

I love anagrams, I really wish I'd thought of that map first.

There are some great station sequences:

Erect Bone - Ye Pun - Braking - Ate Mash - Kaput Porn - Soap Wilt - Wet Mash - Wobbly Embryo

[The_Rev]

Barley Omen

[The_Rev]

[Anthony]

[YLN]

Ireland Quality of Life?

Nope