Contra Heatmap

July 31st, 2014
contra, tech, trycontra
Where is there contra dancing? Let's make a map!


(interactive zoomable version)

Why are these blurry areas instead of points? Because people are generally willing to travel some distance to go contra dancing. To make them less vague you could zoom in. This is US only because that's all the data I have.

(I just went through and updated the full list of dances on trycontra.com, making sure all the links still worked. In the process I also wrote down the approximate number of times per year a dance meets. The raw data is here and if there's something inaccurate about your local dance let me know!

(Yes, it kind of just looks like a population map. Should I be showing dances per-capita instead if I'm interested in relative popularity? Or is it clear enough from this that the north east, especially MA and southern NH are overrepresented?)

Update 2014-08-02: I also made a version with clickable links to dances: heatmap-points.

Referenced in: Where are the Contra Dances?

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The odds are good and the goods are great

I stole the title and thesis of this post from the great etirabys and arguably I should just link her post.

via Thing of Things August 31, 2026

Bug blindness

I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this. For a long time, I thought this had something to …

via Posts on August 30, 2026

Microfictions 2

A few more microfictions, still no LLMs.

via Evan Fields August 7, 2026

more     (via openring)