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How does a city perform during a special event? At the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory we have developed a new technique to answer this question and applied it to an analysis of Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day in Washington, DC on January 20, 2009. This new project, unveiled today and entitled Obama | One People, offers an unprecedented view of the social activities surrounding the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States.

Based on roaming data, we have been able to quantify the reach of this event not just to the Unites States but to the whole world. The main international callers were from Canada, Great Britain, and France. In addition to Puerto Rico, these countries all registered a fivefold increase in call activity compared with a normal day. Representation from abroad was altogether extraordinary: 138 nationalities made or received calls during the inauguration, more than half of all the countries in the world.

Data from US callers also reveals interesting conclusions. In absolute terms, the most represented states were, unsurprisingly, the most populous: California, Florida, New York, and Texas. In relative terms, however, the strongest increase was in the red southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, with a twelvefold increase in call volume relative to normal levels. The states with a tenfold increase in call activity were Illinois, Barack Obama’s home state, and Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, swing states that went blue and voted for President Obama.

The data also reveal interesting insights into temporal patterns. Call activity shows that the Inauguration was a multi-day event for many. Marked increases in mobile phone activity began on the Sunday preceding the Tuesday inauguration and only returned to normal levels on the Thursday following the event.

Obama | One People features two high-resolution 3D graphic visualizations of the call activity during the Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day. The City shows a 3-D color-coded animated surface superimposed on a map of Washington. The World depicts flows of people traveling to Washington and then departing the capital to return home. Through the visualizations one can see peaks in call activity as the crowd anticipates Obama’s oath, a drop in call activity as the crowd listens to Obama’s inaugural address, and another set of peaks as the crowd celebrates the inauguration of the new president.

All information used in this research was provided in an aggregated and anonymous form, thus revealing only the number and home state or country of phones making and receiving calls in a given area, and nothing concerning the identity of the callers or content of their conversations. To make a simple comparison, think of information about traffic on highways: we know how many cars from each state are traveling, but we do not know their particular license number or who is driving them.

Link: http://senseable.mit.edu/obama