Seeing red over map of hatred
The red stains spread out across the maps of the US like bruises or the ink blots of a Rorschach test. They are maps of hate speech, as gathered via Twitter and analysed and plotted by a team of researchers led by the Humboldt University geography professor Monica Stephens.
During the 2012 campaign, Dr Stephens noted the surge of racist tweets made about President Barack Obama, and decided to plot those that were sent with a geocode - an electronic pinpoint - to see if some areas appeared to be more racist than others.
In that early project she discovered that two of the hotspots were Mississippi and Alabama, states that voted strongly against the president and have a history of poor race relations.
Intrigued, she and a group of students decided to map hatred across America using the same method - plotting the location of tweets made with derogatory use of terms such as ''nigger'' and ''fag''.
Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/seeing-red-over-map-of-hatred-20130810-2rork.html#ixzz2bgDbsNj4
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