It appears that you are asking two separate questions. You express curiosity about where flurries of activity come from and also ask for a list of questions that link to yours. These are separate things.
Even if you did build a list of all sites and other SE questions that link to one of yours, it would not have enough information to determine when those links were followed, and thus could not answer your question of where a sudden flurry of recent views / votes came from. SE has the ability to track real-time referrer information, and they probably do track it, but that information is not in the public data dump. I suppose if you went to headquarters and got one of the employees drunk enough they might be convinced to organize and share data with you. I wouldn't count on it.
You will, unfortunately, not be able to satisfy your fundamental curiosity here.
As for lists of questions that link to yours; the easiest mechanism available to us users is one that lists linked questions within a given site, as in nicael's answer (which now seems to be deleted; it was to visit http://mathoverflow.net/questions/linked/{postid}, e.g. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/linked/31222).
Cross site links are not readily available. You could download the weekly public data dump and analyze comments and post text on all questions on all sites to look for links to your questions. The in-site links that nicael mentions are available directly in the PostLinks
table. This task requires a good bit of effort. Even then, this does not answer your question about flurries of recent activity.
Links from outside are not available in SE's public databases.
Search engines like Google, etc., have information about links between sites all across the internet. I am fairly certain this information is not directly accessible to the public, although you can sometimes get some information by searching Google for the URL of your question to see what pages contain it (and get some sense of their age). This is probably the closest you can get to finding a source of activity, but of course this excludes many things (e.g. perhaps it was mentioned in a Facebook comment, in a chat room, on some mailing list somewhere, or on some unindexed page; who knows).
site:math.stackexchange.com mathoverflow 31222
(with or without the site specification) gives a list of links. Do the search results look like what you wanted? $\endgroup$links:http://mathoverflow.net/q/
does find "all" the webpages that link there, but extending the search more specifically tolinks:http://mathoverflow.net/q/31222/6094
fails. $\endgroup$