The geography of America and its inhabitants raises some questions that traditional maps fail to address.
Where, for example, is the boundary between the New York metropolitan area and upstate New York? How far must you go from the center of Los Angeles to officially consider yourself not in the L.A. area?
A website called CommonCensus.org is hoping to shed some light on how Americans perceive their surroundings.
Launched last month by Michael Baldwin, an English teacher living in Brazil, the site asks people to enter their addresses and answer questions about how they perceive their local area. In particular, Baldwin is interested in finding out the boundaries of cities -- where does a city end and the countryside begin?
"When you look at a map of the United States, there are a lot of cities that are just represented as dots, but that doesn't really tell you how far those dots extend their influence," said Baldwin, 25, who developed an interest in voting-district maps as a political science major at Yale University.
Baldwin's goal is to produce maps depicting that information. Earlier this week, he published a prototype map showing areas of influence of major cities in 48 states. But just 4,000 people completed the survey at the time, not a large enough sample to produce an accurate map, Baldwin said.
In addition to cities, CommonCensus also tracks the influence of sports teams. While there is no map available yet, the site is collecting input from visitors about where they live and which teams they support. The objective is to show the extent to which where people live affects what team they root for.
"People have a great deal of curiosity," Baldwin said. "Where can you find Yankees fans? Do they just fall around that one city?"
CommonCensus has much in common with another internet mapping project, Pop vs. Soda, which asks people to enter their hometown and the word they use to describe carbonated beverages. A map produced from the data indicates Northeasterners say "soda," Midwesterners like "pop" and Southerners prefer "coke."
Baldwin has loftier goals for CommonCensus. If enough people enter data (say, close to 1 million), he believes it could be useful in fighting gerrymandering. He also hopes to extend the site to cover other parts of the world.
