Earlier this year, I aspired to create a “2007 Annual Report” that summed up statistics and trends about this year’s FAWM. I’d hoped to make it an annual tradition (like the fawmpilation CD) to document and characterize each year’s event. However, I was just too busy to pull it together in such a form. Several fawmers worked hard to gather up a lot of cool data for this “report,” though, so we can’t just let it go to waste…
Now that we have this blog, it seems like an appropriate (and manageable) outlet for such info. So we’ll kick off this series of posts with a couple of cartograms (maps distorted to reflect a property other than landmass) from FAWM 2007:
First, we have a world map with each country scaled relative to the number of songs posted by its residents. The thin gray countries had no recorded activity, and the larger active countries are color-coded by continent. We also included a list of the top web-browser language settings for the traffic we got during February this year (scaled logarithmically, so “English” should really be even bigger, but you get the idea).
Since we had more detailed location data for American fawmers, we made up another cartogram showing where in the USA our songs came from. States are color-coded by region (Pacific, Midwest, Northeast, etc.), and we also listed the top 10 US cities by total song output. What’s particularly amazing is that the prolific areas aren’t all clustered together. In fact, the major “FAWM hubs” appear to be fairly evenly spread out, which is neat, considering most people learn about FAWM by word-of-mouth.
It will be interesting to see if/how these maps change for FAWM 2008 and beyond. In the meantime, keep your eyes on the blog for more fun stuff and statistics!
Very creative! Cartograms eh? Hmm?
Can we call it the Fawmogram?
I spoze that would be too idiotic!?
It’s fish-eye world! Interesting stuff.
I’m 99.9% sure we were the only group in San Luis Obispo, CA, to do FAWM this year, and we only posted 6 songs, but for some reason I was still compelled to look to see if we showed up. Entirely, completely irrational, but I guess that’s just human nature…
Bret
these are very very cool. however, in the future i hope to see a map with a lot more countries big and bulging - guess i better start spreading the word now!
Ha ha, I had seen these cartograms months ago. I rock. I am in the loop. East my dustbunnies
Anyway, I shall personally see to it that Denmark is hyperinflated on the 08 map. No way am I going to be the only danish FAWMer next year.
Australia and NZ are almost normally shaped. Does that mean they represent the mean? Median? Average? Why, oh why did I drop out of school?
Seeing as how the biggest contributions are from
English speaking (or something that resembles it)countries
I can understand how this cartogram could be so distorted!
Which poses the question as to whether FAWM could be translated to Spanish or any other language for that matter? If so, are there programs out there that would be able to translate the lyrics & would you really want to?
We’ve talked about translating the site to other languages, particularly French, since it’s the only other language *I* can speak (and would make it a bit more accessible in other parts of Europe and Africa). Spanish, German, and Japanese are probably also priorities if we did that (even though Scandinavians are more represented, they also tend to be very fluent in English). Perhaps songs could also be tagged with and searched by language? Hmmm…
I doubt that multi-language FAWM will be up and ready to go by this February, but it is something we’re keeping in mind. Having volunteers to (a) help translate the site into those languages, and (b) help moderate songs/discussions that happen in those tongues is also a concern.
Jinx said “in the future i hope to see a map with a lot more countries big and bulging”
This is poetry, and deserves to be in a FAWM song lyric…
haha, thanks Phil!
It’s not about the languages I think. If you hold a map with broadband home connections next to the one above it will give you almost the same picture.
In Europe the English, Danish, Dutch and Swedish households do have to highest rate of fast internet connections.
So I think it’s better to forget the other European languages, most of us speak English. How many people in Africa (french spoken countries) do have internet at the moment you think ?
If you really want a multi language FAWM you should try Mandarin and Japanese