Profane Mountains, Polite Plains

June 2010
I was in possession of a large quantity of Twitter data, and this is what I ended up doing with it: figuring out where people are more likely to swear. This map shows how frequently certain profanities appear in a tweet based on that tweet's location. The mountains in the title refer to mountains of profanity, not terrain. Some people have mistaken me for accusing Westerners of swearing a lot. The map shows quite the opposite. I probably should have chosen a better title.

This was a one-off project for my amusement, so the data analysis isn't super-rigorous. I've gone into plenty of detail about this project's data and some of the design decisions (including intentionally removing a lot of detail from the map) in a couple of blog posts.