Airbnb listings that advertise Southern culture a surprisingly decent way to define the South, data journalist writes

Share of a state's Airbnb listings that mention terms such as "Southern hospitality," "Southern cooking" or "Southern charm," to name a few. (Washington Post map using Airbnb listing data)

It can be kind of hard to specifically define the South. "The South isn’t just geographic. Plenty of states in the southern half of the United States aren’t even remotely Southern. It’s not entirely historical — it probably goes beyond the boundaries of the Confederate States of America, but doesn’t encompass every former slave state on the Union side. It’s entirely cultural. And culture is notoriously hard to measure," Andrew Van Dam reports for The Washington Post. "Normally, an argument like this would be settled by the Census Bureau, the ultimate arbiter of all things dweeb. But the Census definition of the South seems wildly generous, sweeping up every state from Delaware in the East to Oklahoma in the West."

Data journalists such as himself have been trying—and failing—to find a decent yardstick for some time. But "a final answer remained elusive until we noticed just how many places on Airbnb advertise their 'Southern hospitality' or their 'Midwestern charm,'" Van Dam writes. "All those Airbnb hosts were, we realized, creating a one-of-a-kind map of America’s true cultural boundaries. Airbnb listings represent hundreds of thousands of pages of text capturing exactly how Americans describe their home regions to outsiders, and every single word of it has a geographic location attached."