What New York's Social Network Might Look Like If We Could Actually See It

For about as long as social networks have existed – which is admittedly not very long – researchers and data geeks have been trying to figure out how to visualize them. Digital information is generally not visible, per se. But geography is. And, increasingly, the two are intertwined, as we publish Instagram photos tagged to individual places, or tweet from GPS-enabled smartphones that record where we were when we hit "send."

As a result, a lot of otherwise invisible data that we share with each other has a visible component on a map of the world. Guys in four different neighborhoods in Manhattan are simultaneously tweeting about the same Yankees game. Or one spot in Brooklyn suddenly yields a wealth of Instagram photos – Jay-Z is taking the stage there.