Media is both reflective and prescriptive of the subjects Americans consider important. The game show Jeopardy! includes questions about numerous topics and serves as a bellwether for cultural relevance and popular interest, so I hypothesize that references on Jeopardy! represent American awareness of a topic. Using data from over 6,800 episodes of Jeopardy!, this study identifies which national capitals occur in questions and answers most and least frequently in order to determine what geographic areas are in the American consciousness. Nearly all capitals have appeared on Jeopardy! at least once, but there are dramatic differences in frequency of occurrences, with European capitals being mentioned far more frequently than many African and Asian capitals. In addition, there are some comparatively large capitals that appear infrequently because they tend to exist outside of the circle of American politics.
21 thoughts on “Geographic Awareness and Representation on Jeopardy!”
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Hello! Thanks for stopping by my poster! As a longtime Jeopardy! fan, I have noticed that certain topics appear far more often than others. My results demonstrate that the question writers have an affinity for large cities as well as major Western cities like London, Paris, and Rome, which compose over 10% of questions about capitals, and questions that require recall of less popular capitals are rare. Ultimately it is just a TV show, but for many people, it is likely the only TV show in which a viewer has a chance to think about Belgrade or Ulaanbaatar on a daily basis. To that end, is an appearance on Jeopardy! merely descriptive American relevance or prescriptive as well? That is, do the topics on Jeopardy! simply reflect what we know, or does it also bolster the social standing of a subject? I would love to hear any of your thoughts or suggestions!
Great presentation and the study is very relevant to recent events. Did you see any significant changes in the representation of a country/region/etc. between decades (perhaps because of changes in US-international relationships)?
Hi Hannah, I went into this project expecting to see significant shifts in representation and was surprised to find fairly little. There were a few exceptions; Beijing has become more common recently, and Kabul, Afghanistan has more than doubled in occurrences since the 1980s.
Colton, as a Jeopardy fan, I love this project and the light it shines on the vastness of the show’s trivia. I would be curious to see an analysis of how questions surrounding certain countries increased following a major current event such as those you mentioned for the Middle East and China. For example could there be a temporal correlation between an important current event occurring and the number of trivia questions asked about that country on Jeopardy a month later, a year later, five years later? Or perhaps another variable such as the number of times a country is found in media headlines correlated with Jeopardy questions a certain amount of time later.
Hi Alli, I share your intuition! I would love to expand this to try to pin temporal changes to specific events. There are current event categories occasionally that might drive this, but I would be curious to see if headlines are related to occurrences in less direct ways as well. One thing I noticed while combing through the data is that some capitals will be tied to very specific facts. For instance, Sarajevo is a fairly uncommonly occurring capital, and many questions about it mention it was the host of the 1984 Winter Olympics.
Hi Colton, this is a really interesting poster that examines the cultural awareness of Americans in Jeopardy and I really like the originality of such a topic. It really helps dig into what Americans are currently thinking at the time. i have one question: In your discussion of results page, you noted how obscure capitals end up being used in the context of a question as opposed to more popular capitals that appear in recall questions. Do you think that if you had ran the same analysis with only recall questions being considered, do you think the disparity would have increased further? On a minor note, I think it’d be really interesting to see a gif that explores the evolution of answers of such questions in Jeopardy since you do note that questions became more prominent if there were critical geopolitical events going.
It was a pleasure reading such an original project.
Hi Javier, I think splitting occurrences into questions and answers would produce significant differences. One thing I noticed is that some lesser-known capitals often have hints or puns in the clue. For instance. “About half of French Guiana’s population lives on the island where this “spicy” capital is located” refers to Cayenne, or a question about Kyrgyzstan that reads “Bishkek, which began as a fortress in 1825, is today the leading city of this ‘stan.'” If we were to exclude questions with hints, I suspect there would be even more differences.
Hi Colton- this project is very interesting (and definitely something I will be showing my family members who enjoy the show!). I had a question regarding your conclusion that mentions of different capitals is based on the expected knowledge of the audience. Do you know if Jeopardy! questions are written with the current news cycle or even American middle and high school curriculum in mind? I know you mentioned an increase in mentions for the Middle East and China as time progressed, and I wonder how earlier events, such as the Cold War, still impact the questions that are asked. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Alyssa! It seems that the writers are very in tune with current events and what people learn in school. Here’s a great interview with their head writer Billy Wisse: https://tv.avclub.com/what-s-it-like-to-be-one-of-the-jeopardy-clue-writers-1798277448
Wisse mentions that he is always on the hunt for clues, especially when watching the news or listening to the radio. He also acknowledges that there are significant age gaps in knowledge. So in reference to the the Cold War, younger players do well in topics you would learn about in history books, such as the politics of the Berlin Wall, but people who lived through it have the advantage for questions about popular knowledge, like knowing Pink Floyd played The Wall album live in Berlin to commemorate its fall.
Hi Colton! This was a super interesting poster to read. I was wondering if you had access to data about the “value” of the questions mentioning locations (200$ vs 400$…etc). Do you think this would add an additional dimension and greater nuance to your analysis? I’m curious about variation and trends in mention that occur based on whether questions are categorized as ‘easier’ or ‘harder’. If you ever end up doing anything with that, I’d be curious to see it!
Ooooh That’s a super fun idea I hadn’t even thought of!
Sylvia, that is a fantastic idea! J!Archive does record the point values assigned to questions, so I could consider this dimension. I certainly suspect that less common capitals appear in clues higher point values. I am very curious now and will update here if I get a chance to examine this relationship.
As another Jeopardy fan, I find this project extremely interesting! I wonder how many of the questions or answers containing the names of capital cities weren’t necessarily related to the city’s status as the capital or its geographic location, but the city’s relevance in popular culture due to mentions in the titles of songs, books, movies, etc. (e.g. “Werewolves of London” or “London Calling”). I imagine this would be quite a difficult question to answer as you’d likely have to parse through the large number of questions & answers manually, and their incorporation into your calculus may actually be quite relevant; these examples could raise the awareness of a specific city within American cultural consciousness, which is in line with your research question.
Hi Jackson, you are spot-on. There are plenty of instances, such as the ones you mentioned or categories about idioms that mention “all roads lead to Rome,” where the city itself wasn’t the explicit topic of the question. These instances of cities appearing in pop culture are likely particularly indicative of American awareness; many people are more willing to listen to Warren Zevon than their geography teacher.
On a related note, I did quite a bit of manual cleaning for instances of capitals that do not refer to capitals at all, such as Jack London or Athens, GA, as well as cases where a capital appears within a common world, like Moroni (capital of Comoros) in “oxymoronic.”
As a fellow Jeopardy! fan, I found this poster very interesting. I think you tapped into something important with the idea of recall vs. recognition and how that may impact how questions are written. I’m curious to know which of the questions in your survey were guessed incorrectly by participants and what spatial patterns that might generate. Could this shed light on the recall/recognition discussion? I would also like to know if people who work for Jeopardy! have ever made statements or given interviews where they discuss if they feel their duty as question writers is to educate or entertain the American people (or perhaps, in what ratio). A quotation from a person like that would be a nice perspective to add if you decide to move forward with this analysis.
Hi Samantha, thanks for your comment! I originally planned to look at representation by correct versus incorrect answers but ultimately decided it was too much for one poster, but I would love to return to that dimension. This would be a great supplemental measure of what people truly know.
I read some interviews with writers before starting the project, and they seemed to view their job as creating Jeopardy! for the sake of Jeopardy! They recognize there is a balance to be struck between information and entertainment. In one interview, question writer Michele Loud said “We do not want to stump the contestants. That’s a boring game, and it’s bad television.” So for the sake of good entertainment, it is in their best interests to represent American knowledge.
Here’s the full piece the quote came from if you’re curious: https://www.jeopardy.com/jbuzz/cast-crew/inside-jeopardy-writers-room
Colton – this project is so cool! I think it’s particularly interesting to see the rise in questions about China and the Middle East over the past few decades. It’s neat to think of Jeopardy questions as a repository of information on global affairs in relation to America at a certain point in time; it definitely gives perspectives on how the American view of the world changes over time. I wonder if a similar analysis could be run relating facets of national culture to appearance over time – for example, questions on works of art or famous people from different nations.
Hi Patrick! Absolutely! Capital cities provided a clear geospatial topic for this study, but now that I have the data, I would love to explore other categories. I would expect a study of art like you mentioned to yield even greater disparities, considering the focus on Western art in curriculum and major American museums, and it would be great to explore this.
Great project, Colton. I love that you were able to take a GIS-based approach to something you were already interested in. How did you determine a place’s cultural relevance to Americans in your analysis?
Hi Monica, I considered a capital appearing on Jeopardy! as evidence of relevance. Because it both reflects the common knowledge of the contestants and is seen by millions of viewers each night, the questions and answers both reveal and reinforce what capitals Americans are aware of.
Hi Colton, great independent work scraping all of that data and then managing it all the way up to the table joins to see the results as distributions on the map. It is a very good example of the power of GIS. Your project raises interesting questions regarding the mediation of knowledge–you rightly point out the recursive relationship between Jeopardy! and the viewership: it is both a reflection of and shaper of knowledge about the world. Your study is a good starting point as a sounding into these processes. I could imagine a book in the field of cultural studies (which is ~like communication studies + critical theory + anthropology) on the cultural work that Jeopardy does. You did a great job by focusing on a subset of geographic data in the J! database. I wonder, what other geographic entities might you scrape to look at other geospatial dimensions of the Jeopardy! data? Time trend or emerging hotspot analysis would be really interesting also–as some have mentioned. You could abstract form the geography and generate a space-time cube and look at spatio-temporal trends. One quick observation regarding your hotspot analysis here–remember that Getis-Ord Gi* marks features as hot and cold spots based on their neighborhood. Thus, a given capital city here is grouped with its neighboring capitals (by some neighborhood parameter–how did you define yours–I think IDW would be best) and the feature is marked as a hot/cold/no sig dff based on its neighborhood against the whole dataset (are the values significantly higher/lower than the whole dataset if the values are randomly spatially distributed)? Given that, I wonder if some of the unintuitive hotspots might be patterning in “stumper” questions (hard ones)? You might have hacked the question-makers process a bit! Just a thought.