Contra Weekend Heatmap

August 1st, 2014
contra, tech
I made another heatmap: dance weekends. I took the data from the weekend and festival survey I ran a few months ago, went over it again to pull down a few more band names that have been posted in the interim, and collected locations while I was at it. Then I put them all on a map:


(interactive zoomable version)

Looking at this, there's a giant red blob in the Northeast, but in 2012 I wrote:

Dance weekends are not a major part of contra dance culture in the northeast, but seem to be much more central elsewhere.
What's going on?

Some of it is that the Northeast weekends/festivals aren't branded as "dance weekends": Pinewoods, the Flurry, the Snowball, the Dawn Dance, DEFFA. Some of it is that the weekends that do exist aren't put on by the local dances in a 1-1 relationship: in much of the country the area dance organization runs a weekly/monthly dance and organizes a yearly weekend, but in the Northeast they tend to be separately organized. What else? Or is my impression about the significance of weekend culture just wrong?

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Some thoughts on sexual harassment

I.

via Thing of Things September 30, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

My Weirdy Creatures

Over the last few days, I've been working on some little creatres. But they're very weird. I call them "weirdy creatures". I've made quite a lot of them, I think maybe 5-6, not sure. Weirdy Predator This is a weirdy predator. They'…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

more     (via openring)