SEBASTIAN

The lines between states and even countries are pretty arbitrary: The ties you have with people 50 miles away aren’t going to be too-much affected by some imaginary line drawn up 200 years ago. What if you could remap the United States — not by geography, but rather social ties?
MIT’s Senseable City Lab has done just that, by analyzing mobile-phone calling patterns across the country. By looking at calls between cellphones, they’ve revealed states and cities that are closely connected — and similarly, regions which aren’t nearly as closely connected as you’d think.
Here’s their main result, color-coded by regional affiliation…

more: Infographic Of The Day: Cellphone Calls Reveal The United States’s Invisible Ties | Co. Design
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Call Data Community Map
Administrative boundaries are often at odds if one compares these to a bottom up approach calculating the regional delineation only based on how people interact. Communities based on call data is one example of how such interaction-based communities can be defined. The result is striking in that some states merge and others split. For example sister states emerge, such as Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and Tennessee and Kentucky among others. Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and West Virginia form a new “state”, while St. Louis (Missouri) expands its reach and splits Illinois into two communities. New Jersey and California also split into two separate communities because of large cities. In contrast, Texas remains whole, despite potentially splitting cities of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. We observe that the inter-city communication is strong enough to hold Texas together…

more: The Connected States of America | Visuals

The lines between states and even countries are pretty arbitrary: The ties you have with people 50 miles away aren’t going to be too-much affected by some imaginary line drawn up 200 years ago. What if you could remap the United States — not by geography, but rather social ties?

MIT’s Senseable City Lab has done just that, by analyzing mobile-phone calling patterns across the country. By looking at calls between cellphones, they’ve revealed states and cities that are closely connected — and similarly, regions which aren’t nearly as closely connected as you’d think.

Here’s their main result, color-coded by regional affiliation…

more: Infographic Of The Day: Cellphone Calls Reveal The United States’s Invisible Ties | Co. Design

—

Call Data Community Map

Administrative boundaries are often at odds if one compares these to a bottom up approach calculating the regional delineation only based on how people interact. Communities based on call data is one example of how such interaction-based communities can be defined. The result is striking in that some states merge and others split. For example sister states emerge, such as Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and Tennessee and Kentucky among others. Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and West Virginia form a new “state”, while St. Louis (Missouri) expands its reach and splits Illinois into two communities. New Jersey and California also split into two separate communities because of large cities. In contrast, Texas remains whole, despite potentially splitting cities of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. We observe that the inter-city communication is strong enough to hold Texas together…

more: The Connected States of America | Visuals