Animating the spread of documented events: A History of the World in 100 Seconds
Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin have extracted all the events documented in Wikipedia that include both geographic coordinates and dates (15,500 of them) and created this animated representation compressing the time scale down to 100 seconds.
I find this fascinating and well worth watching several times as there seem to be different inferences to discover with each viewing.
The first thing that struck me is how Eurocentric the map looks. This is interesting given where the data comes from. Anyone can create a Wikipedia page but the events cluster around Europe and the Near East until American colonisation takes off. Is this because of Wikipedia’s policies on documentation or is there another factor inhibiting the dating of events outside the scope of first-world history.
And secondly where is India in this? Surely there is a vast supply of documented history from there. Why is that peninsula not brighter in this visualisation?
Gareth and Tom have made the datasets available so if you feel moved to make something inspired by their work head to, ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds/
