The fad to chart massive amounts of data often leaves me (and others) shrugging. Cool pictures but...
This one is original -- charting the migration of well-known people from their births to their deaths, principally in the general Europe-to-North-America neighborhoods. I need to spend more time with it to understand what it's really telling us -- same same problem again -- meanwhile, this is very worth spending time with.
From YouTube description:
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.
I'm not surprised to see that Barabasi is involved.
Here's the link (embed not working).
