Googleが公開しているデータベース「Freebase」にはさまざまなデータが保存されており、誰でも無料で閲覧できます。そのFreebaseに登録されている歴史上の人物や社会に功績を残した人たちの「生まれた場所」と「亡くなった場所」のデータを解析し、どのようにして人が文化や知識を世界に広めていったのか、世界地図上で可視化したアニメーションが「Charting culture」です。
Humanity's cultural history captured in 5-minute film : Nature News & Comment
http://www.nature.com/news/humanity-s-cultural-history-captured-in-5-minute-film-1.15650#/b1
http://gigazine.net/news/20140805-visualize-humanity-culture-spread-the-world/
◇ Charting culture - YouTube
This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble. The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable individuals. The team is based at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Read Nature's news story: http://www.nature.com/news/1.15650
Find the research paper in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6196/558
