Do you say soda, Coke or pop? NC State grad student creates maps of regional dialects that take Internet by storm
By Renee Elder relder@newsobserver.com RALEIGH, NC (NEWSOBSERVER.COM) — A New Jersey native who swapped “hoagies” for “sub” sandwiches when he came to N.C. State University for graduate school has found himself in the international limelight in the past week thanks to his detailed maps that illustrate speech patterns across the nation.
Joshua Katz, a 28-year-old doctoral student in statistics, drew on his longtime interest in regional dialects to create the online maps for a statistics class project at N.C. State University.
After a link to his work appeared on The Abstract campus blog, Internet users reposted it to the social news site Reddit, then BusinessInsider.com picked it up. That generated a whopping 30 million views during the project’s first week online. “It got so popular so quickly, it passed our server’s capacity limits and crashed,” Katz said.
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