“This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their 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. The team is based at the University of Texas at Dallas.”

Source: www.youtube.com

This video has garnered a lot of academic and mainstream attention–while I wouldn’t describe in as the Entire History of Human Culture in 5 minutes as the Huffington Post did, it is a stellar visualization that uses big data and was created with some solid academic research.  Hierarchical diffusion patterns are powerfully depicted in this video created by Nature that as are other geographic concepts such as urban settlement patterns (e.g.-primate cities and rank-size rule in Europe).

Tags: historical, culture, diffusion, mapping, visualization.