Over at The Atlantic Cities, I have an article about a data visualization project of mine. Working with my collaborators, DeDe Paul of AT&T, Vincent Blondel of Belgium’s Université catholique de Louvain, and Dominik Dahlem of IBM, we set out to examine the complex borders that divide people, separate from all the geopolitical borders:

When we think about borders, we tend to think of administrative boundaries. Those demarcating lines, often grown out of rivers and mountain ranges or diplomatic quirks, govern our daily lives, and that’s doubly so if we live near a neighboring country or state.

We know that these boundaries are on some level unnatural. Driving around Kansas City, where I live, makes this abundantly clear. Gas price differences aside, it can be difficult to tell which state you’re in, Missouri or Kansas, and the small street of State Line Road does nothing to make it clearer.

But are there more organic borders, brought to life by our own actions and activities? I recently set out, along with a team from MIT and AT&T, to see if I could find an answer. Previously, members of our group had collaborated to use mobiles phones call and text message records to determine how tightly connected different counties are to each other. But communication is far from the only way in which we are connected or separated. We can be connected based on where we move, how we speak, and even what sports teams we root for.

We combined a variety of datasets, from politics to language to how people move and talk to each other to create the above map, in order to see if there were unified borders and regions in the United States:

We combined several maps into one to see if any patterns emerged. At first glance, the result seems incredibly messy, although there are certain borders that do jump out (such as the Mississippi River, for example). But when we zoomed in on smaller regions, it was easier to pick out a few natural borders.

For example, New England is incontrovertibly a single region, connected by interaction, mobility, and culture. Similarly, certain states such as Texas and Kansas are their own distinctive regions.

On the other hand, New Jersey and California have a distinct bisection that divides them, though not always in the same way or place.

The complete article, with lots of maps, is here.