Yeah, this weirdly splits the Atlanta metro area in half between two regions based on the counties, and while north Atlanta and south Atlanta metro have decidedly differing cultures (along mostly but not entirely racial lines) the split is completely arbitrary on county lines with Fulton County, GA jutting upwards as if the 10 miles across that county don't represent anything on either side of it

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madcaptenor 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Fulton County is a weird shape for historical reasons - it absorbed the counties to its north and south during the Depression - and historically the northern part of Fulton County (everything north of the Chattahoochee River) was Milton County. If Milton County still existed it would probably end up in Woodard's "Greater Appalachia" over "Deep South".

We can ignore current settlement patterns because Woodard does. In a recent paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00330...) he does explain the methodology, although I don't have access - but from the snippets I can see it appears that he's essentially trying to work out who the first European settlers in each area were. So it doesn't matter that north Fulton County is full of carpetbaggers from up North and immigrants. (I write this as I sit in an office in north Fulton County; I am a carpetbagger from up North and many of my co-workers are immigrants.)

It makes sense for the split to be along county lines just because a lot of data will be available at the county level, but it occasionally produces absurd results. I occasionally have mocked these splits as "I drive to Appalachia for ramen", because I used to live in DeKalb County about a mile from the DeKalb-Gwinnett county line - according to Woodard's map, DeKalb is "Deep South" and Gwinnett is "Appalachia" - and I liked a ramen place just over the county line. (Since then both I and the ramen place have moved.)

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mixdup 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe I misinterpreted what this is supposed to show. Is this based on data from like 150 years ago or is it based on how things are today?

This is similar to something I saw on reddit over the weekend which was a similar map but based on local cuisine. I live in North Fulton County now, but I'm originally from central Alabama and the dividing line for the cuisine was between "soul food" and whatever other term they had come up for deep fried food

Basically it was white people southern food vs. black people southern food (which, at the end of the day is actually not that different)

curious if this Appalachia vs. "Deep South" thing is really just a racial divide in the data with "Deep South" being African American descendants of slaves across the Black Belt and Appalachia being the more white population

	▲	madcaptenor 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, I saw that map too. The map in this post is historically based, I think, but they don't say that very loudly. And definitely some of what we're seeing in this data is a racial divide - but the racial divide in the South goes back to where slave-based agriculture was and was not viable.