Have you tried Wikipedia Seismograph ( https://wikitwister.com/seismograph.html )? The Seismograph uses Wikipedia page view data to find spikes in public interest for Wikipedia topics, then presents the spikes on a chart where you can turn them into Google News searches.
Wikipedia Seismograph allows you to use these page views as relics of historical interest, what I call fossilized attention, to detect specific time spans when someone or something might have been in the public eye. Those time spans can become date-bounded Google News searches — specific and hopefully information-rich search spaces that allow you to do a focused collection of data.
This upgraded version of the Seismograph adds the ability to pan and zoom the chart, meaning you can explore all the way back to January 1, 2017 if you like (there are presets if you want to look at smaller time spans.) Personally I’ve been using the Seismograph a lot lately with people in the Epstein files and political figures who have returned to the public stage. One good example of that is Corey Lewandowski, who is Kristi Noem’s good friend. He has been involved with Trump on and off for what, a decade? And has done so many offputting things it’s hard to keep up. We’ll kick off by looking him up in Wikipedia and generating a chart showing spikes in his Wikipedia page views since January 1, 2017:
Wow, that’s a long chart and a lot of spikes. Instead of tracking plain page views, this chart is mapping the deviation in views across a 7-day moving average. That’s why there are spikes below zero; when a page drops in views after a spike the deviation will briefly drop below 0 as the spike is taken into account in the 7-day moving average.
Let’s explore a spike! To zoom in on the chart, ctrl-scroll (Google Maps style). You can also click and drag to pan. Let’s take a look at that first really big spike in February 2018. I’ll zoom in:
We’ve zoomed in to between February 4, and March 25 to discover that the view spike was on March 1st, when the Lewandowski fan page had 88,351 views. That looks like a good day to explore, doesn’t it?
Let’s make a Google News search for Corey Lewandowski on March 1, 2018. On the right side of the chart you’ll see a Mark dates button. Click on that to go into marking mode; after that you can click on either side of that spike. As you click on each side a red line will appear. After you click for the second line a button will appear underneath the chart to open a date-bounded Google News search in a new tab. Let’s make a search for March 1 and maybe a day or so before and after.
All you got to do to search Google News is hit that button! A search result page will open in a new tab.
Hmm, I’m surprised to see the name Hope Hicks instead of Lewandowski. A quick check of the stories show that he was both a senior advisor to America First Policies (see the first result) and someone who Hope Hicks refused to talk about to congressional committees (see the next two results.) In this case Lewandowski is more of an adjacent character in the news cycle. I wonder if this was his first time really in the public eye?
Anyway, we’re looking more for stories where he’s the main character, so we need to look elsewhere. To exit Marking mode, click on the Done marking button. From there you can start panning and zooming again or click the Reset Zoom button to reset the chart to the original result.
I made a decision to have the searches persist even after you reset the chart, but if you want to get rid of one just click the remove button.
Let’s do another search, this time looking at that next big spike in June.
I peeked. Spoiler: this one is both irritating and enraging.
I’d forgotten this. How about you? In this case a date bounded search focused hard on one story — Lewandowski saying “Womp womp” in response to the news that a child with Down syndrome was separated from her mother. Ugh.
Using Wikipedia Seismograph’s new zoom feature means you can explore over nine years’ worth of public interest data in any Wikipedia topic with one chart and easily turn it into date-bounded Google News searches. I suspect I’ll be spending a lot of time with it as new names from the Epstein files roll in (not all of them have Wikipedia entries, but a nonsurprising number do.)
Wikipedia Seismograph is part of WikiTwister ( https://wikitwister.com/ ), a collection of eight tools for bending Wikipedia data into interesting shapes. It’s free to use and free of ads. Check it out the next time an unfamiliar figure turns up in the Epstein files. Maybe you’d like to check out Les Wexner.
