Socio-cultural migration of the 2600-year period of history in 5 minutes: cognitive visualization

All roads lead to Rome - that was once. Now the roads lead to many places, and people more or less freely travel around the world, with the goal of finding either a second homeland, or simply a place for a comfortable life.

Maximilian Schich, a historian from the University of Texas at Dallas, used data from the vast Freebase database to search for the migration routes of 120 thousand people, thinkers, scientists, cultural figures, from ancient times to our days.
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The time interval is from 600 BC. to 2012, to be exact. The database includes, for example, Solon, the ancient Greek thinker, lawyer and poet, Thomas Aquinas, Da Vinci, and many other people. There are modern personalities, including scientists, actors, philosophers.



On the map are marked the point of birth and the point of death of a person (blue is the point of birth, red is the point of death). The points are connected by lines, allowing you to track some interesting trends, including the disappearance of old and the emergence of new regions of cultural influence. For example, you can track the influence of Rome on the manifestation of Paris as a cultural center.

By the way, the developer who created the video posted another interesting work at books.google.com , where the use of a certain quotation or a couple of catch words in world literature and, accordingly, of people's minds is clearly tracked.

Via nature