Happy Halloween from Floating Sheep: Zombie Corn Mazes

The Floating Sheep collective is always looking for new aspects of socio-spatial life to map and holidays are always a good excuse. Unfortunately, between teaching, cleaning out the rain gutters, writing, traveling, cleaning out the $%#* gutters again, reading, and day-to-day life, Halloween has snuck up on us. So to quote Monty Python, the maps today "have been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute".

Regular readers already know about our fascination with the zombie trope (See our seven part series on "Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse") and it should come as no surprise that we return to the topic today. Especially after the massive zombie walk in downtown Lexington last night. This time, however, we decided to spice up the map a bit albeit at the loss of such "optional" things like a legend, an orientation reference and the ability to convey information in a clear manner.

References to Zombies

Shifting from style to substance, we now present an extremely basic map that shows the relatively concentration of references to "corn mazes" in Google Maps. The key thing to remember about this map is that this data is NOT standardized but represents the absolute number of references at these points. It is therefore very intriguing to see the much higher number of references to corn mazes in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas then the coastal regions. Much of the geoweb is concentrated in the big urban centers on the coasts but this example shows how locally relevant material does find its way onto the geoweb.

References to Corn Mazes

So after this brief foray into insight, we return again to the world of style over substance (and that's a very generous interpretation of style) with a map of something that is truly scary, Voldemort. After all, those death eaters probably had to flee England and it would be good to know where they set up shop. Apparently New York is the most likely location with a strong concentration in Chicago!

References to Voldemort

Happy Halloween, stay tuned for some more analysis on zombie tweets!