Beer Vs. Church: This Map Shows Which Is More Popular On Twitter (Guess Which One)

Really, the image above says it all. Combined, Twitter’s U.S. user base talks about beer a lot more than it talks about church.

Floating Sheep (via io9) decided to look at some Twitter conversation around the U.S. to analyze where people are tweeting about beer, and where people are tweeting about church. To do so, they used their “DOLLY project,” a submission to the Knight News Challenge, which maps geographic social media and official data sources.

“DOLLY is still not quite ready for general use, but the backend database is all set which makes it really easy to pull out user generated geocoded data, in this case from Twitter,” says Floating Sheep’s Monica Stephens.

They took all of the geotagged tweets sent from within the continental United States between June 22 and June 28 (including 10 million tweets), and extracted the ones that contained the words “church” or “beer”. 17,686 tweets contained “church” and 14,405 contained “beer”. Half of the church tweets took place on Sunday. The beer tweets, Stephens says, were pretty evenly distributed throughout the week.