There was a lot of interest in the posts I wrote Tuesday and Wednesday — using the results of two SurveyMonkey Audience polls — about which states make up the South and the Midwest. We’re making the data available on GitHub.
On our GitHub page, you’ll find the responses to the South and Midwest surveys in CSV format. So you can make heads or tails of what they mean, there’s a file explaining what is what.
We’re excited to see what folks do with the data. There’s some information I didn’t use — such as respondent ZIP code, income, gender and region — that could make for interesting approaches. There’s also a column that may be of interest to people who want to do some language analysis: We asked respondents to say where they live, in their own words.
I’m especially interested in approaches that use the ZIP code data: Where are the Southern and Midwestern expatriates? Do local definitions of regions explain the Midwestern inability to agree on the core states? And how split are residents of difficult-to-categorize states, such as Missouri and Virginia, on their own identity?
Please send any data remixes to me. The data we posted from articles on Bob Ross and the Bechdel test resulted in fantastic remixes — and we might post interesting things that use our research as a kickoff point. You can also send any questions or new findings to walter.hickey@fivethirtyeight.com. The whole point of our endeavor was to learn more about these particularly nebulous regions, so insight will be appreciated.