A History of the World in 100 Seconds on Vimeo

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1. A History of the World in 100 Seconds

1 year ago

Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin (@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia's view of world history. Watch as empires fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.

This won "Best Visualization" at Matt Patterson's History Hackday in January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 events with locations. Then we mapped them over time.

More information and datasets: ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds/

Credits

805 Likes

Anda Lupascu
1 week ago
Renaud Baur
1 week ago
Katherine Shilling
1 week ago
Victor Espinosa
2 weeks ago
kazukuni
2 weeks ago
Shanna Aubin
2 weeks ago
Victor Ionescu
2 weeks ago
Arron Tierney
3 weeks ago
muharrem yildirim
3 weeks ago
peterdj5s
3 weeks ago

Tags

@BriMcs 1 year ago

History of Humanity.
Toby Downton 1 year ago

Well that is pretty darn cool
Darren Geraghty 1 year ago

Beautiful visualization, a brief time of history.
Shaun Tollerton 11 months ago

I wee'd a little after watching that. Good stuff!
markus lorenz schilling 11 months ago

this is worth a tweet - a interaction possibility would transform the hole project into a killer app
Kyle McDonald 11 months ago

so cool! really incredible how euro-centric it is. i wonder what it would look like if events were weighted by their appearance in the non-english wikipedias?
JRichmond 11 months ago

Everything's kinda slow until the 1900's, and then it just moves way too darn fast! :)
david_bowman 11 months ago

Really cool!
It would be more informative if a simple map was used in the background too.
Can Yilmaz 11 months ago

cool :)
DieTapete 11 months ago

really cool, weighting the impact of the events would also be quite interesting.
Philip Han 11 months ago

The ending frame looks like beautiful out of focus picture of earth at night!
Andraz Jeric 11 months ago

Very euro-centric indeed.
nickpepito 11 months ago

Someone should put this to music.
Miltos G 11 months ago

Great idea and work!

I also agree it would have been nicer if there was a map in the background.

Also, 1080p version would be nice !
Tex 11 months ago

By the end of it, you don't need a map :)
Matthew McNamara 11 months ago

Any chance you can/want to export some high res images for backgrounds and what not?

Well done.
José Gonçalves 11 months ago

Great job!
ghostDancer 11 months ago

Wonderful. it's amazing.
supersupersuper 11 months ago

WOWOWOWOWOWWOWO!! I need this to add my birthday! Perfect invitation ;)
Jonas Lonborg 11 months ago

Looks like Jesus didn't go to North America after all; who would have thought.

Gorgeous visualization, congratulations! =)
Noah Hayes 11 months ago

Great visualization. Does the use of color have any significance?
Gareth Lloyd 11 months ago

@Noah Hayes: No, the colors are randomized. It would be interesting to try and pull more significance out of the individual datapoints, but Wikipedia is a big beautiful mess, so that's a big challenge.
Andrea Niosi 11 months ago

I think I just witnessed North American getting discovered! Beautiful work, thanks for sharing your creativity. (Agree about music, but no suggestions on what to use). ;)
mariano reguero 10 months ago

Excelente!!!!!!! :)
Christopher Chambers 10 months ago

Not bad!
Completely reminded me of this:
youtube.com/watch?v=4BbkQiQyaYc

Which is completely worth suspending one's attention deficit for the 7.5 minutes.

Also, for sound I would suggest some sort of triggering like:
mta.me/
where you could delegate certain notes or octaves to co-ordinates, or have the pitch shift in accordance with the rate of increased point-plotting.
N. Emre Akdemir 9 months ago

Cool but a background music should be added as well.
ArMAN 7 months ago

eye love it
Cedric Nguyen 5 months ago

maybe it just means we only know and have interest for western culture ... a little bit sad conclusion

What about the same work based on Baidu database or indie wikipedia ?
Silvino González Morales 2 months ago

Beautiful work, a lot of Eurocentrism there but wonderful in any case.
lageneraciónperdida y el vídeo 2 months ago

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones". EINSTEIN