A sociologist and a graduate seminar took data from petitions for secession from the United States as listed on whitehouse.gov and mapped the patterns. Here is the map and some of the results:

While petitions are focused on particular states, signers can be from anywhere. In order to show where support for these secession was the strongest, a graduate seminar on collecting and analyzing and data from the web in the UNC Sociology Department downloaded the names and cities of each of the petition signers from the White House website, geocoded each of the locations, and plotted the results.

In total, we collected data on 862,914 signatures. Of these, we identified 304,787 unique combinations of names, places and dates, suggesting that a large number of people were signing more than one petition. Approximately 90%, or 275,731, of these individuals provided valid city locations that we could locate with a US county.

The above graphic shows the distribution of these petition signers across the US. Colors are based proportion of people in each county who signed, and the total number of signers is displayed when you click or hover over a county.

We also looked at the distribution of petition signers by gender. While petition signers did not list their gender, we attempted to match first names with Social Security data on the relative frequency of names by sex. Of the 302,502 respondents with gendered names, 63% had male names and 38% had female names. This 26 point gender gap is twice the size of the gender gap for voters in the 2012 Presidential election. For signatures in the last 24 hours, the gender gap has risen to 34 points.

So it looks like the petition signers are more likely to be men from red states and more rural counties. On one hand, this is not too surprising. On the other hand, it is an interesting example of combining publicly available data and looking for patterns.