I love maps. Check out these. Artist and programmer R. Luke Dubois used information from millions of online dating sites to create county-level maps of the United States based on words most often used in profiles. In an interesting twist on the red state/blue state dichotomy, Dubois uses the colors to represent men and women, and the brightness of the color represents the frequency of the word. North Texas and the state of Wyoming has a lot of lonely men, while the lonely women can be found in the South Carolina low country. Also interesting is the brightness flip between the "crazy" and "shy" maps. The northern plains are shy, while the coastal areas are crazy.
Dubios has another set of maps where he places the words themselves onto the map surface according to the spatial location at which they occur in the dating profiles. These are really interesting at the regional level: artistically geo-referenced local vernacular expression. "Gaslight," "Codder," and "Drinks" appear in the Boston suburbs. "Fastball," "Jailer," and "Irrigation" show up in Eastern Nebraska.
