With the many applications of social media, we are glad to see the folks at HyperCities included in the mix – more specifically their use of their archiving project to preserve the going-on’s in Cairo, over the past month.  In a nutshell, the HyperCities project can be explained by this “hypercities is a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment”.  If you take a look at the HyperCities Egypt project you will find current Tweets and historic ones, all filtered through the use of event related hashtags.  The Tweets are geniously placed on an intensely local map, allowing users from all throughout the world to visualize the impact of the people’s movement against Mubarak’s position.

The HyperCities project is the brain child of three UCLA Digital Humanities collaborative members; Todd Presner, Yoh Kawano, and David Shepard.  The project, although providing a thorough view on Cairo, is still in its beta stages, so searches in less talked about cities and on less talked about topics, may result in errors.  Regardless, the project itself has a ton of promise and provides another ingenious way for the public to access archives, chronicling monumental times in history.