The Growth of the Tea Party

By Chris Wilson

April 15, 2010

Like so many modern political riptides, the Tea Party conducted much of its organizing in small groups online. For Tax Day, a sort of unholy marker on the Tea Party's calendar when members are particularly active, we decided to try to map their proliferation.

To gather data for the story, we went to Meetup.com, a leading online organizing site for people of all interests, and mined data from the event calendars of every group tagged with both "tea party" and "politics." This gave us thousands and thousands of events to map over time.

This posed a problem. Dynamically creating thousands of objects on a map at once is a big drain on a computer's resources. Fortunately, a man named Michael VanDaniker wrote an Actionscript library to produce heatmaps, which aggregate data into clusters to show where the densest activity is located. Combining Michael's library with the Google Maps API for Adobe Flex, we were able to show the hotspots of Tea Party activity without making anyone's computer smoke (as far as we heard).