Culture
How Flickr Predicted Hurricane Sandy's Landfall
An amazing comparison of social media meta-data, in two charts.
Modern mega-events like natural disasters or public rallies are unlike their historic predecessors for one big reason that excites sociologists: Now these famous moments are insanely well-documented by the people who witness them.
Take Hurricane Sandy. In addition to all that debris and damage, the storm left behind an extensive trail of tweets, Flickr photos, and even evolving Wikipedia edits. That data is now feeding the growing field of computation social science, more finely informing what we know about how vast groups of people behave during extraordinary situations.