BB readers may remember musician/artist R. Luke DuBois’ 2005 song “Billboard,” in which he combined nearly 1,000 Top 100 songs into one piece of music. His latest project, “A More Perfect Union,” was spawned during several years of online dating. DuBois became fascinated with the language used in the profiles. So he overlaid data from 19 million online dating profiles onto US maps. Turnstyle talked to DuBois about “A More Perfect Union.” From Turnstyle:
Looking at the Naughty map (image above), DuBois said that from this image he can tell that no one in Wyoming used “naughty” in their profile, but bigger amounts of women in Colorado used “naughty. In addition, all the purple on the Nice map suggests that both men and women use “nice” in their profile.
Other maps that DuBois puts next to each other include, “Marriage vs. Techno,” Dominant vs. Submissive,” and “Funny vs. Sarcastic…”
In addition to color-coded maps by gender, he also scanned a Rand-McNally Road Atlas into his computer and replaced the city names with unique words. “Not the word people used the most [in their dating profiles] – but the word that was used uniquely in that place – the word that shows up there more than anywhere else,” said DuBois. The atlas maps are labelled with 20,000 unique words. He rattled off some combinations:
Dallas – “rich”
Houston – “symphony”
Santa Cruz – “liberal”
Atlanta – “God,” “company,” “coca,” “jazz,” “protestant”
“19 Million Profiles Later… Online Dating Lingo Tapped and Mapped” (TurnStyle)
“A More Perfect Union” (LukeDubois.com)
R. Luke DuBois at bitforms gallery
UPDATE: Here’s a video about the project.