Obsession Over Zombies

                         

 Our favorite geographers behind the Floating Sheep blog have done some pretty sober work mapping the digital geographies of racism, conflict, and inequality. For a while now, though, they’ve also been at work on a slightly lighter project that seems fitting for a sweltering Friday afternoon (it is sweltering in Washington, and so we assume it is sweltering everywhere). At the intersection of the Internet and the real world, they’ve also been mapping zombies.

Because, well, “looking for and mapping geo-coded references to zombies on the web provides insight on the memes, mechanisms and the macabre of the modern world.”

Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton and Matthew Zook have contributed a chapter on the topic to a new book of academic essays about zombies (or zombie-themed metaphors that explain the current state of academia). By querying all of the geographic information indexed by Google for zombie-themed keywords, they’ve actually plotted the physical places with the largest number of such geo-tagged hits.
 
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