Mapping The Hidden Geography Of Language Through The News

Geography of locations mentioned in close proximity to the word "love" in global news coverage April 6, 2017 to May 4, 2018 as monitored by the GDELT Project Geography gives us an incredible lens through which to see the world. While we often think of maps in terms of information that already exists in the spatial domain, such as building addresses or GPS coordinates, the written word contains a tremendous volume of locative insights. What happens when we combine fulltext geocoding with the power of the cloud to analyze hundreds of billions of words of global news coverage to map the hidden geography of the language of news? Language is inextricably interconnected with geography. Each day as we consume the stream of information available about the world around us, we are inundated with mentions of location. The news media in particular is saturated with locative references, anchoring our understanding of the world in space.