Zombies are the hot topic all over the world. It makes sense. After all, The Walking Dead is coming back next month… and then there’s that whole zombie apocalypse thing coming next year. Now the Oxford Internet Institute has put together a map based on the social media activity that mentions zombies all over the world. Not surprisingly, Los Angeles and New York City seem to have the biggest case of brain eaters on the brain. It’s also a pretty big topic in eastern Europe and Japan.
Using a keyword search for “zombies,” the following map visualizes the absolute concentrations of references within the Google Maps database. The map reveals two important spatial patterns. First, much of the world lacks any content mentioning “zombies” whatsoever. Second, and related, the highest concentrations of zombies in the Geoweb are located in the Anglophone world, especially in large cities.The results either provide a rough proxy for the amount of English-language content indexed over our planet, or offer an early warning into the geographies of the impending zombie apocalypse