Two weeks ago, John Caelan of Swamppost.com created a one-and-a-half minute, time-lapse video of the major uprising and protests around the world between December 18 to March 7, 2011.

By analyzing a wide field of news sources, he argues that the map is adequately scaled, and reflects the density of reported demonstrations across a wide field of news sources. However, he does acknowledge that the video does not represent all the events of protests or uprising in the world.

The colors for the icons represent:

• Red: resulting in death
• Orange: major injuries, damage, arrests
• Yellow: minor injuries
• Green: Peaceful

The number of pickets is the size:

• 1: Under 100
• 2: 100-1000
• 3: 1000-10000
• 4. 10K – 100K
• 5. Over 100K.

By utilizing open media research of worldwide news sources, Caelan compiled 80 maps for each day with the events added as they are discovered, so the apparent “blossoming” of events is simply a reflection of data that is available early on. His general methodology was to filter through the first thousand results of a news search on any given day, record the event, and archive them on an Excel sheet. The information in Excel was organized by day, and then further categorized by the location of where the events occurred, which he extracted from the articles manually. The flag icons were chosen by the average of reporting, as 100% accuracy in reporting the actual count of people at any gathering is intrinsically difficult, regardless of slant that the involved media parties tend to apply. Each day’s sheet was turned into a .csv file, and imported into the mapper supplied by Zee Maps. Caelan said that each day would be copied into the Excel sheet, with new events added–events older than 5 days are deleted, and those events older than 2 days turn to gray. Each event remains in color for two days, to account for the crossover of time zones. As he built most of these in retrospect, the December and early January time frame has less of the more obscure demonstrations because they were more difficult to research.

In addition, the video below compliments the original Global Protests & Uprisings video, however,  this is the time-lapse series of maps focused in on North Africa and the Middle East for the period of December 18, 2010 to March 7, 2011.

Caelan, however, is aware of the unreliability of these results in showing worldwide trends. Due to the mainstream media now actively providing coverage and following the protests, he says, this map shows how the reporting on uprisings or protests have dramatically increased.  Although he does not that this does not necessarily accurately reflect the quantity of protests themselves. He comments on the website:

Before ‘protest’ came to the forefront of international lexicon, there was much less density of reporting on demonstrations, and this was the primary reason for the perceived ‘viral’ pattern of the global uprisings. Suddenly, it’s pages upon pages of search results; however, as you point out, thousands of actions go unnoticed, even more so eclipsed by the weighty mass of popular revolt than before.

To find out more information about the uprisings shown in the video where you can click on the different icons and read information on the protest that was recorded at that point in his interactive map.