Communications of the ACM
Twitter Maps Show Americans' Beer Preferences
Reseachers at the University of Kentucky have mapped tweets to learn preferences for beers and beer brands by U.S. states.
Credit: Blowfish
University of Kentucky (UK) researchers mapped tweets to discover the real-world preferences of brews and beer brands in the United States. The tweets were taken between June 2012 and May 2013 as part of the Digital OnLine Life and You Project, a database repository at the university that stores the 6 billion geotagged tweets that have been sent worldwide since December 2011.
"The Twitter maps quite accurately reflect various regions' history and cultural practices surrounding beer production and consumption, and show just how much reality and cyberspace overlap," says UK researcher Matthew Zook.
The researchers found that although the dominance of Bud Light and Coors Light nationwide is not surprising, geographic preference for Coors Light in the Western U.S. highlights the overall preferences in certain regional and state markets.
"Beer, like many other social practices, may be millenniums old but the socio-spatial practices associated with it--checking into a brewery, posting a review, geotagging a photo--continue to evolve and therefore our approaches to data and research must also evolve to capture these geographies," says UK researcher Ate Poorthuis.
From Phys.Org
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