Charting Culture
Mapping cultural mobility through the births and deaths of notable individuals across history
A Network Framework of Cultural History
Charting Culture is a Nature video published in August 2014 together with a paper in Science Magazine introducing "A Network Framework of Cultural History." The animation distills hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes, mapping cultural mobility by tracking more than 120,000 births and deaths of notable individuals.
Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, the 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.
A poetic translation of two supplementary movies in the Science paper, the video has accumulated more than 1 million views on YouTube. It helped to make the paper a top Science download of the month, while itself became one of the most viewed Nature videos in channel history.
