Mapping Russia

A decade ago, when you wanted to do research, you used to transport your body to something called “libraries,” where you would slog through card catalogs, bound indexes, microfiche and what not to find information.

Now we have library card catalogs and worldwide databases at our fingertips and hardly have to leave home to conduct research any more. The problem, of course, is that there is too much information on the web and most of it has no editor, so there is way to tell what is real and unreal, useful and useless.

But thankfully, there is good stuff out there too, if you know where look. Like the Modern Language Association’s website, which features a new Language Map. This wonderful effort has merged US geographic and census data to come up with a cool interactive map of languages spoken in the US, by location.

Thirty languages and three groups of less commonly spoken languages are mapped, using 2000 census data responses to the question, “Does this person speak a language other than English at home?” The Language Map illustrates the concentration of language speakers in zip codes and counties.

We used the map to show how many Russian speakers there are in California, and where they are (grey is low concentration, purple is high). You can pick your own map and look for pockets of fellow Russian speakers in your area.

http://www.mla.org/census_map