A network framework of cultural history (Video I) European birth-death network dynamics, offering a meta-narrative of cultural history based on the FB dataset, 0 to 2012 CE (67 seconds). The dynamically applied color scheme indicates birth sources (blue) and death attractors (red) in correspondence to Fig. 1C. Individuals in the videos appear as particles gravitating towards their death locations, indicating collective directions of flow. The video is rendered with one frame per year at 30 frames per second. Further characterization of the movie content is given in the text and Fig. 3A. - Humanitys cultural history captured in 5-minute film Video map of births and deaths shows rise and fall of cultural centres. Nature 31 July 2014 doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15650 nature/news/humanity-s-cultural-history-captured-in-5-minute-film-1.1 5650 All roads lead from Rome, according to a visual history of human culture built entirely from the birth and death places of notable people. The 5-minute animation provides a fresh view of the movements of humanity over the last 2,600 years. Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues used the Google-owned knowledge base, Freebase (https://freebase/), to find 120,000 individuals who were notable enough in their life-times that the dates and locations of their births and deaths were recorded. The list includes people ranging from Solon, the Greek lawmaker and poet, who was born in 637 bc in Athens, and died in 557 bc in Cyprus, to Jett Travolta (freebase/m/052wf5f) — son of the actor John Travolta — who was born in 1992 in Los Angeles, California, and died in 2009 in the Bahamas. The team used those data to create a movie that starts in 600 bc and ends in 2012. Each person’s birth place appears on a map of the world as a blue dot and their death as a red dot. The result is a way to visualize cultural history — as a city becomes more important, more notable people die there. The work that the animated map is based on was reported on 31 July in Science (1). The animation reflects some of what was known already. Rome gave way to Paris as a cultural centre, which was eventually overtaken by Los Angeles and New York. But it also puts figures and dates on these shifts — and allows for precise comparisons. For example, the data suggest that Paris overtook Rome as a cultural hub in 1789. Schich’s team also viewed their data in the context of data from the Google Ngram Viewer (https://books.google/ngrams), which shows how often certain phrases or words were used in the general literature at a given time, an indication of the topics that might have been on people’s minds. The researchers used the Ngram data to identify events that might suggest the waxing or waning in importance of a hub. They also did a similar experiment using data from various sources on the births and deaths of 150,000 artists. That revealed, for instance, that more architects than artists died in the French revolution. Historians tend to focus in highly specialized areas, says Schich. “But our data allow them to see unexpected correlations between obscure events never considered historically important and shifts in migration.” References 1. Schich, M. et al. Science 345, 558–562 (2014). A network framework of cultural history Science 1 August 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6196 pp. 558-562 DOI: 10.1126/science.1240064 sciencemag.org/content/345/6196/558 Editors Summary A macroscopic view of cultural history Sociologists and anthropologists study the growth and evolution of human culture, but it is hard to measure cultural interactions on a historical time scale. Schich et al. developed a tool for extracting information about cultural history from simple but large sets of birth and death records. A network of cultural centers connected via the birth and death of more than 150,000 notable individuals revealed human mobility patterns and cultural attraction dynamics. Patterns of city growth over a period of 2000 years differed between countries, but the distribution of birth-to-death distances remained unchanged over more than eight centuries.Science, this issue p. 558 Abstract The emergent processes driving cultural history are a product of complex interactions among large numbers of individuals, determined by difficult-to-quantify historical conditions. To characterize these processes, we have reconstructed aggregate intellectual mobility over two millennia through the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 notable individuals. The tools of network and complexity theory were then used to identify characteristic statistical patterns and determine the cultural and historical relevance of deviations. The resulting network of locations provides a macroscopic perspective of cultural history, which helps us to retrace cultural narratives of Europe and North America using large-scale visualization and quantitative dynamical tools and to derive historical trends of cultural centers beyond the scope of specific events or narrow time intervals. Supplementary Materials sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/07/30/345.6196.558.DC1/1240064.Schich.S M.pdf Movie S1: European birth-death network dynamics, offering a meta-narrative of cultural history based on the FB dataset, 0 to 2012 CE (67 seconds). The dynamically applied color scheme indicates birth sources (blue) and death attractors (red) in correspondence to Fig. 1C. Individuals in the videos appear as particles gravitating towards their death locations, indicating collective directions of flow. The video is rendered with one frame per year at 30 frames per second. Further characterization of the movie content is given in the text and Fig. 3A. sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/07/30/345.6196.558.DC1/1240064s1.mov Movie S2: North American birth-death network dynamics, offering a metanarrative of cultural history based on the FB dataset, 1620 to 2012 CE (13 seconds). As in Movie S1, the dynamically applied color scheme indicates birth sources (blue) and death attractors (red) in correspondence to Fig. 1C. Individuals in the videos appear as particles gravitating towards their death locations, indicating collective directions of flow. The video is rendered with one frame per year at 30 frames per second. sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/07/30/345.6196.558.DC1/1240064s2.mov
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 12:39:27 +0000
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