Watching How Ideas Spread Over Social Media

Social media, like Twitter, have been widely used for exchanging information, opinions and emotions about events happening across the world. The authors introduce a new visualization tool for tracing the process of information diffusion on social media in real time. The design highlights the social, spatiotemporal processes of diffusion based on a sunflower metaphor whose seeds are often dispersed far away. The design facilitates an understanding of when, where and how a piece of information is dispersed for large-scale events, including campaigns and earthquakes, as a tool witnessing today’s information consumption and dispersion in the wild.