Map of

Color a world or US map by how semantically close a word is to each country (or state) name. Built on Google News Word2Vec. The geography of meaning ends up remarkably readable: "vodka" lights up Eastern Europe, "desert" the dry bits of the planet.

Examples: cricketvodkacrisiscarnivalasiadesertmalariacoffee

Word2Vec associates a vector with each word by processing large amounts of text. The vectors land in a semantic space where similar words sit close together, and you can do arithmetic on them (the classic example: king − man + woman ≈ queen). Restricting the comparison set to country (or US state) names turns that space into a fuzzy choropleth of meaning.

The model is Google News word2vec (3M words, 300-dim). I converted the 12 GB binary into a sqlite-vec database that ships in this project's static directory: each lowercase word stores the sum of its case-variants as one float32 vector, looked up with a primary-key lookup on every query.

Sometime when you least expect it, Love will tap you on the shoulder... and ask you to move out of the way because it still isn't your turn. -- N. V. Plyter