Description
At the beginning of our research, we focused on tracing who was participating to the debate online. We found the most popular website talking about marijuana legalisation and we examined if they were always the same actors talking across all the country.
We started by taking a map of the United States and positioning each website - as a dot, coloured with his target category- within the corresponding state, once we had all the dots in place we linked all the websites - therefore dots - appearing in more than one state.
The buttons allows to see just one category at a time and the list of websites on the right side to look at each websites behaviour in the map. The websites are ordered according to their popularity. This way, we can see which are the main actors of the debate, where do they speak and how they spread across the United States. The above output is a new geography of U.S.A. when talking about marijuana legalisation.
Below the first map there are to maps that shows the most and least interconnected states. The former five states, North and South Dakota, Michigan, Delaware and Maryland have seven domain in common with the others while the latter, Tennesee and Ohio share just one domain with other states. We were looking for a pattern or some corrispondence whereas all these states share a similar legal situtation, some of them allow the medical use only of marijuana while others consider it a misdemeanour. We didn't find the pattern we expected through this protocol.
Another finding is about the most popular websites throughout all the United States which are norml.org and thecannabist.co, both with the mission of bringing awarness and news about marijuana and its legalization in the U.S.A.
