Birth and Death Records Help Create Macroscopic View of Cultural History

Art historian Maximilian Schich and his co-authors created a macroscopic view of cultural history by analysing birth and death records of 150,000 notable individuals over a period of 2000 years.   They sourced their data from Freebase.com, the General Artist Lexicon, and the Getty Union List of Artist Names.  The findings were published in "A network framework of cultural history", Science 1 August 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6196 pp. 558-562 DOI: 10.1126/science.1240064.  A video created in conjunction with the paper and the same underlying data has received more than a million view on YouTube.  Free access to the paper and the video is available through:

http://www.cultsci.net/

This is yet another example of how access to data can advance the state of research, innovation, and multi-disciplinary collaboration.
 
Editor's Summary:

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.