Skip down to main content

Mapping the Tea Party Movement Online

Published on
22 Oct 2010
Written by
Mark Graham

Since Sarah Palin was recently talking about our blog on cable news shows, we decided it was only fair to map out her so-called tea-party movement.



It is interesting that the West Coast and the northeast of the country have some of the highest relative and total hits for the tea party. Perhaps this refudiates the claim that these are less pro-America parts of the nation. Or, depending upon your point of view, it may confirm that the coasts are out to destroy the country.

Also the patterns we see in the above slice of cyberscape, represented by data drawn from Google Maps, is matched by another slice of cyberscape drawn from Twitter. A presentation by Pete Skomoroch, Kevin Weil, and Sean Gorman shows the distribution of tweets with the term tea party. It shows Lady Gaga, as well, if you’re curious (check out slide 68).


We should also point out that just because you can’t see Russia on these maps is no reason to misunderestimate them. There’s also a distinct possibility that we’re missing out on a whole slew of geotagged data due to the misspelling of fairly simple words.

Related Topics:

Privacy Overview
Oxford Internet Institute

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies
  • moove_gdrp_popup -  a cookie that saves your preferences for cookie settings. Without this cookie, the screen offering you cookie options will appear on every page you visit.

This cookie remains on your computer for 365 days, but you can adjust your preferences at any time by clicking on the "Cookie settings" link in the website footer.

Please note that if you visit the Oxford University website, any cookies you accept there will appear on our site here too, this being a subdomain. To control them, you must change your cookie preferences on the main University website.

Google Analytics

This website uses Google Tags and Google Analytics to collect anonymised information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. Keeping these cookies enabled helps the OII improve our website.

Enabling this option will allow cookies from:

  • Google Analytics - tracking visits to the ox.ac.uk and oii.ox.ac.uk domains

These cookies will remain on your website for 365 days, but you can edit your cookie preferences at any time via the "Cookie Settings" button in the website footer.