August 2016
In April 2015, when I was still working at Tages-Anzeiger, we published a hugely successful dialect quiz. After a week or two, we had over 2 million unique visitors, also thanks to the co-publication by Spiegel Online.
The resulting prediction
The quiz predicted someones most likely cities of residence, and users could give feedback on that (see the form on the right side above).
Now comes the thing that stunned me the most: Over a third of all visitors actually filled that form out – we ended up with over 670’000 responses, i.e. people’s answers to the 25 questions and their self-proclaimed location of residence as WGS84 coordinates.
In the R statistical environment, I summarized these point data to hexagons and exported them to GeoJSON/TopoJSON. Now we had 25 different maps (for the 25 different initial questions, better: words) that showed the regional distribution of answers (better: pronunciations), based on the biggest online dialect survey ever conducted in Europe. We published these maps on the online presence of the Swiss Public Broadcast (SRF) as well as on tagesanzeiger.ch and spiegel.de.
One of the resulting maps, showing the distribution of pronunciations for the phrase “quarter past 10” in German-speaking Europe