Home BlogData Visualization Mapping the World’s Changing Cultural Hubs

Mapping the World’s Changing Cultural Hubs

by Travis Korte
by
A visualization maps notable historic figures' birth and death locations to reveal migration patterns.

A map visualization from researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas shows human migration patterns over the last 2,600 years. Drawing from the Google-owned Freebase information repository, researchers took 120,000 notable individuals and mapped their birth and death locations. The resulting visualization, which is somewhat biased toward North America and Europe, shows how the hotspots of human culture changed during the rise of the Roman empire, the Renaissance, and the modern era. It wasn’t until 1789, for example, that Paris overtook Rome as the western world’s cultural hub. The researchers hope their work can help historians identify migratory patterns that might have had an influence on historical events.

Take a look.

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