“In the months before a U.S. Presidential election, the quality of political discourse hits new lows,” Renee DiResta writes, pointing to the facile blue-state/red-state characterizations tumbling around the news cycle these days. “So I started wondering, how do Americans really think about ‘those people’ in other states?”
With that, DiResta, an associate at the seed-stage investment firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, developed an interactive infographic that uses a simple web tool to reveal the most common stereotypes for each state. DiResta plugged “Why is (state) so” into Google, let autocomplete’s algorithms work their magic, then plotted the top hits on a map of the United States. “It seemed like an ideal question to get at popular assumptions, since ‘Why is (state) so X?’ presupposes that X is true,” she writes.
To read the original article: 1 | Infographic: State Stereotypes, From Fat Tennesseans To Liberal Californians | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
