Data Prospecting: Looking under iReport's surface

// Blog home »

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Welcome to the first of what will become a regular feature here on the CNN iReport blog. We'll dig below the surface of the videos, photos and stories you submit and look for meaningful, interesting or just plain fun gems of information to share.

To start off, we're taking a look at the locations of iReport submissions. We created this map using the location data generated with most stories. The pink dots represent iReports and the darker areas represent higher concentrations of submissions.

Not every story has a location assigned in our database. This map reflects nearly 350,000 iReport stories submitted between February 9, 2008, and January 27, 2010, or about two-thirds of all iReports during that period.

The data makes it clear that more iReports come from the U.S. (particularly the eastern half) than other regions, but parts of Europe aren't far behind.

A fun feature of this view is that if we remove the background map, it's possible to mostly make out the shapes of the continents (except for Antarctica):

Location is just one of the topics we'll explore as part of this series. We've been inspired by other sites' self-examinations -- such as Foursquare, MetaFilter and the dating site OK Cupid -- and hope that by exploring our own data we can learn more about the iReport community, or at least have some fun.

If you have questions, thoughts or suggestions, please let us know.

Posted by: cmerrill // February 17, 2011
Category: community

6 Comments

February 17, 2011