Courtesy R. Luke DuBois and bitforms gallery, New York
But R. Luke Dubois, an artist, composer and professor of digital media, wanted to track Americans in a different way. Dubois, who creates interpretive representations of data, decided in 2010 to map the United States based on the words used in online dating profiles.
So he signed up for 21 different online dating services - from Match.com to eHarmony - and programmed an automated system to create profiles in every zip code of the country. Then he used a spider - a specialized program that crawls the entirety of a site and downloads all the information within it - to download all the profiles of potential matches. In total, he wound up with 19 million dating profiles.
The effort took 10 computers three months, and once he had the data, he used it to create an alternate census. He took a map of the United States and created an algorithm that replaced every city's official name with the word that was used more often in profiles there than it was anywhere else.
Take a look at what the dating profiles in Dubois' project, called "A More Perfect Union," show about US cities.