CultSci

Charting Culture is a Nature video that was published in August 2014 together with a paper in Science Magazine introducing A Network Framework of Cultural History. As detailed in the official description, "the animation distills hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes, mapping cultural mobility by tracking more than 120,000 births and deaths of notable individuals. [...] Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, the 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." A poetic translation of two supplementary movies in the Science paper, the video has accumulated more than 1 million views on YouTube so far. It helped to make the paper a top Science download of the month, while itself became one of the most viewed Nature videos in channel history. The video itself contains a brief explanation how to read the visualization. Further related content, including extended animations of individual video sequences and an open-access link to the Science paper are available at http://www.cultsci.net.

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