Visualizations of online dating language

BB readers may remember musician/artist R. Luke DuBois' 2005 song "Billboard," in which he combined nearly 1,000 Top 100 songs into one piece of music. His latest project, "A More Perfect Union," was spawned during several years of online dating. DuBois became fascinated with the language used in the profiles. So he overlaid data from 19 million online dating profiles onto US maps. Turnstyle talked to DuBois about "A More Perfect Union." From Turnstyle:

Looking at the Naughty map (image above), DuBois said that from this image he can tell that no one in Wyoming used “naughty” in their profile, but bigger amounts of women in Colorado used “naughty. In addition, all the purple on the Nice map suggests that both men and women use “nice” in their profile.

Other maps that DuBois puts next to each other include, “Marriage vs. Techno,” Dominant vs. Submissive,” and “Funny vs. Sarcastic..."

In addition to color-coded maps by gender, he also scanned a Rand-McNally Road Atlas into his computer and replaced the city names with unique words. “Not the word people used the most [in their dating profiles] – but the word that was used uniquely in that place – the word that shows up there more than anywhere else,” said DuBois.  The atlas maps are labelled with 20,000 unique words. He rattled off some combinations:

Dallas – “rich”

Houston – “symphony”

Santa Cruz – “liberal”

Atlanta – “God,” “company,” “coca,” “jazz,” “protestant”

"19 Million Profiles Later… Online Dating Lingo Tapped and Mapped" (TurnStyle)

"A More Perfect Union" (LukeDubois.com)

R. Luke DuBois at bitforms gallery

UPDATE: Here's a video about the project.

• [Sork]

  Techno – Marriage’s nemesis.

• [AnthonyC]

  If Atlanta didn’t also have “cola,” then I think we have a problem.

  • [Sork]

    They are deep in coke territory. http://www.popvssoda.com/

• [MadMolecule]

  Here in Memphis, “musician” is apparently pretty common–no surprise. But you don’t have to go far out of town to start finding words such as “nipple,” “mafioso,” and “concede.” I’m curious as to what these ads said.

• [MrsBug]

  Love the idea, hate the color scheme. Difficult to parse, but maybe that says something about me.

• [jennybean42]

  I wish he had used a different color scheme than the one that political pundits throw up every couple of years to describe the politics of the nation– but perhaps that was part of the point.

  Interesting work, though.

  • [RyanH]

    Red and blue have been go-to contrasting colours for about as long as we have been making info-graphics of any sort.

• [Ryanwoofs]

  Very interesting. I’d have to say that Alaska is under-reporting on the Crazy descriptor. Or maybe it’s just a given, since we’re all here because we’re not all there.

  The presentation could be a little more modern and accessible though…frames??

• [sidb]

  The article writer from TurnStyle is not geographically literate enough to tell Houston and Dallas apart. Looking at the source map from the lukedubois.com site (not directly linkable, alas), the word “Rich” appears on Houston, and “Symphony” appears on Dallas.

  • [EvilCatBucky]

    You’re right, which is weird since here in Dallas we’re overrun with $30,000 millionaires trying to flash money they don’t have to pick up women.

• [starbreiz]

  Jezebel ran this in February. The conclusion was mostly that the map is horrifically difficult to interpret: http://jezebel.com/#!5749133/data-map-the-kinkiest-states-in-america