This map is a New Maps Plus project. Use the dropdown menus at top, left and right to explore the relative frequency of March Madness teams' fans tweeting.
More saturated (darker) colors indicate a higher probability of tweets containing the text of the selected team. Hexagons without a significant number of observations/tweets do not show up. That's why some teams have more coverage than others.
Utilizing the Leaflet library, the map aggregates point-level data into hexbin polygon units to show the spatial distribution of the tweets related to specific teams. The comparisons of two teams uses a 5-class divergent color scheme. The map is also projected into an Albers equal-area projection (with the help of CartoDB's cardodb.proj extension).
Data for this map was pulled from the Dolly project. Scripts in R and Node.js further processed and aggregated totals into hexbin polygons, and encoded the results as GeoJSON, which were then loaded into the map client-side at runtime.
Special thanks for their input and feedback: Taylor Shelton, Andy Woodruff, and Sam Matthews.
The Twitter API
The code for this project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unsupported License and hosted as a New Maps Plus GitHub repository.
We apologize, but this thematic web map is best experienced on a tablet or PC.
While this is a terrible practice in most web design cases, we also believe that some interactive thematic maps don't really belong on smaller phones and handheld devices.