Computer scientist André Panisson collected an hour of retweets carrying the hashtag #jan25 around the moment Hosni Mubarak resigned on 11 February 2011, and rendered the network as an animation. What the visualisation showed was the speed at which the news of the resignation moved through Twitter — the network reorganising itself in the space of minutes.
Panisson described watching it happen as a kind of coverage in its own right: “It was very interesting to see, in real time, the exact moment when Tahrir Square, from a mass protest demonstration, has been transformed in a giant party, and the burst in the Twitter’s activity. It was like covering in real time a virtual event, a big event that was happening in the Twitter virtual world.”
Network visualisations of a live event were a novelty in 2011. The technique has since become an ordinary instrument for studying how information travels during a breaking story.