Six Degrees of Seperation (linguistics edtition)

  So the proverbial 'scientists' have done it again.  Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University are using computer software to track the development of language, and colloquialism, across the US.
  The BBC published this article, written by Phillip Ball, recently exploring the work of Jacob Eisenstein, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech.  Eisenstein is using Statistical Analysis techniques to analyze around 40 million messages from about 400,000 different users to track where different terms, like "bruh" or "af", originated from and have moved to.

Image from Visual Complexity

  In the case of "bruh," the term originated in the southeast US and moved to southern California due to it's usage on Twitter.  The result of tracking terms like these is a representational map of how different slang terms and emoticons have moved across the US, perhaps even across international borders.  Think of movies where detectives use string and different photographs to track suspects in an organized crime case (they may still do this)
  This new system of organizing and analyzing data could help linguistics and other researches in many ways.  The entertainment industry could now localize productions to specific geographical locations.  Law enforcement could use this to track different slang or gang terms across the country to track where gangs are located and spreading to.  Linguists could use the information to project the spread of colloquialisms across geographical lines and gain a better understanding of how culture develops.

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