Two Visualizations: Wikipedia Edits During Middle-East Protests & Global Pulse (Twitter During Japan Earthquake)

These visualizations were recently shared on VisualComplexitity and added to their wonderful searchable/browsable database.
1. Wikipedia Edits During Middle-East Protests
by Elijah Meeks

[The four images shown] are from a short, dynamic visualization of edits to Wikipedia pages from December 1st to February 20th, 2011. It focuses on pages about nations where protests and revolutions occurred as well as pages about the protests themselves. Edits are color-coded by type, with orange-red lines indicating changes that added to a page whereas purple indicates changes that removed text from a page.

2. Global Pulse
by Abdur Chowdhury et. al.

Twitter is a remarkable tool to analyze information diffusion, and investigate social patterns and trends. In June 2011, Abdur Chowdhury and his team at Twitter posted a few visualization experiments covering the volume and worldwide scale of Twitter messages during the devastating earthquake in Japan on March 11.
As they stated on the original post: “During major events, people use Twitter to share news and thoughts with friends, family and followers around the world. Messages originating in one place are quickly spread across the globe through Retweets, @replies and Direct Messages. We see this behavior during everything from sporting events like the World Cup to widely-televised news events like the royal wedding, and also in the face of major disasters like the March 11 earthquake in Japan, where the volume of Tweets sent per second spiked to more than 5,000 TPS five separate times after the quake and ensuing tsunami.”

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