sarahslo
commented
6 years ago Sorry to say, but it's not about sandwiches, it's about language! And there is never a good time to use Google trends. Any time you have data that is a black box, where you there is no way to know what the baseline is you don't have a real measure.
Have you ever seen this project? It's broken at the moment, but read through the methodology and it will give you a sense of the question you are asking: https://qz.com/862325/the-great-american-word-mapper/
Pitch
Summary
I can't get a hoagie in this city to save my life. Any deli, bodega or lunch counter looks at me crooked when I ask for one. "a sub, you mean?" "No, a hoagie." Blank stares. "Sure...a sub." It's the same ingredients, sure, but does a rose by any other name taste as sweet?
A sandwich is realatively straight forward. Two piece of bread sliced from a full loaf stuffed with condiments, vegetables and usually meat. But what is this combination called when the same fillings are crammed between a single oval loaf of bread sliced length-wise? Well, a lot of that depends on where you're from.
Hoagie, hero, grinder, sub, wedge, zeppelin, spukie, blimpie– the variations are legion. But how far from home can I go before I start getting strange looks when asking for a hoagie? Is there a hard line dividing these regional names? Let's find out.
This piece was inspired by Matt Daniels' Pudding.cool piece Mapping Gastronomic Borders in the US. I'll be aiming for a fun chlorepath like they made for that piece
Details
Possible headline(s): What's a Hoagie? Mapping the Sandwich Data set(s): Google trends data at least at first. Google has cleaner, better data but getting them to share that with me may be difficult. Code repository: https://github.com/malbasi/data-studio/tree/master/code/06-sandwich
Possible problems/fears/questions: The data from Google Trends isn't geocoded so, dealing with google's mapping API is my biggest hurdle. Also, the data they put out is all relative and nothing is absolute. That will make any conclusions I draw suspect from a statistical point of view, but we're talking about sandwiches here, not science. I think relative is ok for our purposes.
Also worth noting, subs or submarines is the dominant American term for this type of sandwich. It's so prevalent that when added to this relative data set it absolutely crushes the percentages of the other terms. I'll be using two data sets, one with and one without subs.
Work so far
Worked through the long list of names that a hoagie can be called and developed search parameters that work with google trends. That list is as follows: Hoagie + hoogie + hoggie + Hoagies + hoogies + hoggies hero + heros -shooting -gopro grinder + grinders -coffee -herb - salt sub + submarine + subs + submarines zeppelin + zep + zeppelins + zeps blimpie + blimpies
Completed the basic cleaning of the data and started to poke around to see what's what.
Bar graphs for now. Once I get the data geocoded I'll be able to start on the true end product, the maps.
Hoagies' geographic prevalence:
Where the hero rules
Subs dominate
Checklist
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