Around 2005, back when email was the social network of the day, an email petition started going around in Quebec. It was something about the government wanting to remove arts from the school curriculum (which turned out to be a hoax). The mail contained a list of signatories, and recipients were asked to add their name at the bottom, then forward it to basically everyone they knew. Soon everyone in Quebec was forwarding it to all their friends.

I personally received multiple copies of the petition, from unrelated people. Each copy had taken a different path to reach me, and so they all started with the same list of names, but then at some point the list forked off, and by the time they reached me each copy was different. This is not a very good approach to gather signatures, but it does create cool data, and I thought I'd try to map out the paths taken by the petition

I collected as many samples of the petition as I could find: from my own inbox, from online forums, or with the help of friends (You can still help btw -- search your inbox for "arts secondaire" and forward me any copy you find). I aligned the lists them by putting them side by side and lining up matching names. Then I printed it out as a tree. It looks like this:

There's a lot of room for experimentation with cooler visualization techniques, here, starting perhaps with a tree representation that's easier to browser than a 50-megapixel image. Perhaps one could also look at social patterns of email chain propagation, though we don't have much data about the people involved. We do have a town name for most of them, so we could try and plot on a map the geographical travels of the petition.