Perhaps some of you have seen this already, but I just came across this very interesting data visualization of Wikipedia-referenced historic events, and thought I’d share it. Visually, it’s a very interesting representation, though clearly captures a rather Euro-centric view of history.
It seems I can’t embed video in the blog, so here’s the link:
To quote the author / creator:
“Many Wikipedia articles are tagged with geographic coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Cross referencing these two subsets and plotting them year on year adds up to a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia’s view of world history.”
Thanks, Sara. It’s interesting to consider what really *is* being mapped here. How do people decide what tags to assign to particular articles? If we then cross-reference these w/ sites of historic events, are we essentially “validating” the accuracy of the authors’ tags? Or does this visualization show us something else?