5-Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History
5‑Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History

			

	


Work­ing with his col­leagues, Max­i­m­il­ian Schich, an art his­to­ri­an at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Dal­las, took Free­base (Google’s “com­mu­ni­ty-curat­ed data­base of well-known peo­ple, places, and things”) and gath­ered data on 150,000 impor­tant artists and cul­tur­al fig­ures who lived dur­ing the long arc of West­ern his­to­ry (6oo BCE to 2012). The schol­ars then mapped these fig­ures’ births and deaths (blue=birth, red=death) and traced their move­ments through time and place. The result is a 5‑minute ani­ma­tion (above), show­ing how the West­’s great cul­tur­al cen­ters shift­ed from Rome, even­tu­al­ly to Paris (cir­ca 1789), and more recent­ly to New York and Los Ange­les. Maps doc­u­ment­ing the flow of ideas and peo­ple in oth­er geo­gra­phies will come next.
Accord­ing to NPR, “The mod­els [used to cre­ate the videos] are the lat­est appli­ca­tion of a rapid­ly grow­ing field, called net­work sci­ence — which uses visu­al­iza­tions to find the under­ly­ing pat­terns and trends in com­plex data sets.” And they could yield some unex­pect­ed insights into the his­to­ry of migra­tion — for exam­ple, even with the advent of planes, trains and auto­mo­biles, mod­ern artists don’t move too much far­ther from their birth­places (an aver­age of 237 miles) rel­a­tive to the art­sy types who lived in the 14th cen­tu­ry (133 miles on aver­age).
A com­plete report on the project was pub­lished in the jour­nal Sci­ence by Schich and his col­leagues. Unfor­tu­nate­ly you’ll need a sub­scrip­tion to read it.
via NPR/Nature
Relat­ed Con­tent:
Social Media in the Age of Enlight­en­ment and Rev­o­lu­tion
Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es
Euro­pean Cul­tur­al His­to­ry in 91 Free Lec­tures by George Mosse
		