Stereotypes mapped out

At her No Upside website, blogger Renee DiResta has designed a U.S. map that logs the most common stereotypes of the 50 states.

DiResta determined these stereotypes by harvesting information from Google’s auto-complete function, which tracks previous searches and shows the most frequent below the search field. DiResta typed “Why is [name of state] so” into the Google search field and then collected the commonly asked questions about each state under the field.

She then created the map. When a reader makes the cursor hover over a state, it lists the most common questions about that state. In the case of Arizona, for instance, the most common questions asked by Google users are, “Why is Arizona so hot? … so racist? … so conservative? … so crazy?”

In Nevada’s case, the questions are “Why is Nevada so dry? … so hot? … so dangerous? … so sparsely populated?”

The question about danger may be related to Nevada’s long-standing place at the wrong end of so many national quality of life rankings, such as crime rates, suicide rates, tobacco use, firearms deaths, children’s health, toxic releases, infectious disease and so on.

The map can be found at http://tinyurl.com/8z6n86c.