<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>As another great example of this, researchers at the University of Warwick, the University College London, and Boston University just published some striking data on Flickr use during Sandy. In the journal Scientific Reports, they describe examining photos uploaded to Flickr between October 20th and November 20th of 2012, sorting for the words "Hurricane," "Sandy," or "Hurricane Sandy" somewhere in the tags, title, or description text.</p><p>They tabulated the number of images by hour and found some startling symmetry between Flickr users and the behavior of the storm itself. The number of images increased as Sandy moved closer to the U.S. coast off of New Jersey. And then this happened:</p><p><a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/11/remarkable-accuracy-flickr-photographers-during-hurricane-sandy/7512/">Keep reading...</a></p>