Artist Luke DuBois decided to create a census of his own based on the adjectives people use to describe themselves on online dating sites. He joined twenty-one sites, culled information from 19 million profiles, and compiled a list of over twenty thousand words that he then ranked by frequency within each zip code. The result is a work entitled A More Perfect Union that maps the self-identifying characteristics which show up in one zip code (or city) more than any other. DC gets the expected words like congressional, speechwriter, etc. But it also gets: melanin, raisin, and polygamist.
Interestingly, women who describe themselves as kinky rank highest in West Virginia, but men using this term rank highest in the Southwest. Above is DuBois' national map of shyness as it breaks down by gender.
· A More Perfect Union [Official site via CNY and CoDesign]