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:

Ozy and Vasili Review Lilo and Stitch

Sometimes my seven-year-old, Vasili, wants to see some godawful movie that makes me want to melt my eyeballs out of my head.

via Thing of Things June 27, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

Workshop House case study

Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC.

via Home April 30, 2025

more     (via openring)