The Stanford Humanity Lab has a research project about crowds that sounds pretty nice.

CROWDS focuses on the rise and fall of the crowd -- particularly the revolutionary crowd -- in the Western sociopolitical imagination between 1789 and the present. Participants are broadly concerned with exploring the intersection between a number of disciplines: psychology, photography, literature, painting, cartooning, film, and history, to speak only of the foremost. In the long-term, we plan to publish a multi-authored volume on the subject of crowds, create a searchable digital archive of rare, out-of-print books and articles, and mount a large-scale exhibition tracing the history of the rise and fall of the crowd in modern art. Our preliminary research results take the form of this image-intensive web site.

The website gives more information.

Why do I blog this? One of the reason I am interested in crowds is because I see them as an indirect social cues available in the environment. People usually tend to rely on this kind of information to make decisions. Crowds is a peculiar example: a crowd has severeal meaning: something is happening, the lenght might also inform the importance of the event...