Do People Tweet of Mashed Turnips?, and other Thanksgiving Day Mysteries

While trying to avoid the hard work of stuffing the turkey or the pain of listening relatives who want to rehash the election, we decided to take a look at Thanksgiving-related geocoded tweets across the United States. We're not doing a lot of interpretation of these, but hopefully the maps do a decent job speaking for themselves, though it is important to note that all maps show raw counts without any kind of normalization.

Since turkey tweets are everywhere, we thought it might be fun to take a closer look at some of the more off-beat or regionally-specific Thanksgiving traditions using some new tools being developed to extend the capabilities of the DOLLY project.  Some rather off the cuff observations:

• Grits, okra and hot dish have strongest regional tweet clusters in the south and upper midwest, respectively.
• Very few people are tweeting about mashed turnips (who knew?), but those who are, are doing it in the areas around New York City.
• Oyster and chestnut stuffing have the strongest concentrations in the Northeast.
• Texas prefers pecan pie relative to apple or pumpkin pie.
• People are still tweeting about turducken.
• NPR listeners really are concentrated in the Northeast (as per the Mama Sternberg Cranberry Relish Twitter index).

Search for Grits

Search for Okra

Search for "hot dish" OR "hotdish"

Search for "mashed turnips"

Search for stuffing

Search for oyster* AND stuffing

Search for chestnut AND stuffing

Search for apple AND pie

Search for pecan AND pie

Search for pumpkin AND pie

Search for turduckling OR turducken

Search for "cranberry" AND "sternberg", 

inspired by Mama Sternberg's Cranberry Relish Recipe

HO! HO! HO! Oh, wait... that's something different, isn't it?