Who would have thought that your preferred takeout decision 🍕could be a cultural statement? Matt Daniels' did.
In his pudding.cool article, "Mapping Gastronomic Borders in the US", Daniels found the taco capital 🌮 of the US, uncovered the Pacific Northwest's coffee obsession ☕️ and
intuited regional preferences such as the South's affinity for barbecue 🍗.
These facts were not just fun trivia - they shone light on 300 years of US history and today's culture 🇺🇸
Inspired by this model, we wanted to take it to a different domain. In a world inundated with media 📺, what tells more about a person than what they choose to watch? Everything from Finding Nemo to Black Swan tells us about who we are as a country. We looked at Google Search trends for answers to these questions.
Before your mind is totally blown 😉, let us explain why these maps look funky.
These maps are broken down in Nielsen media markets, or areas in the US that receive the same media offerings (TV, radio, cinema etc.).
Markets are identified by the largest city, which is usually located in the center of the market region.
Action
Drama
Sci-Fi
Fantasy
Comedy
Horror
Animated
Click any genre map preview below for full-size interactive version below
A movie may be a smash.... but does popularity last?
Use this interactive slider tool to check out the popularity of a movie over time.
Use the dropdown menu to check out our favorite movies and move the slider to time travel 👩🏽🚀
Released March 16, 2012.
Drag the slider above to view interest over the years!
We thought we would end this adventure with a little ~friendly~ competition. Which genre will reign supreme? 👑
Use the dropdowns to see which of the 5 genres is most popular in your town.
But what's going on behind the scenes, you ask? To determine which genre was more popular in a given market area, we compared their genre interests values and colored the
map with the color of the more popular genre. The darker the color, either green or purple,
the closer the search interest rank is to 💯.
American region data projection code is from Simon Legg and Simon Zou from this github repo.
