

History of the [Western] world in 100 seconds [According to Wikipedia] - shawndumas
http://flowingdata.com/2011/03/21/history-of-the-world-in-100-seconds-according-to-wikipedia/

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RyanMcGreal
Impressive visualization, but I'd love to see it overlaid on an actual world
map for geographic context.

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DanI-S
I'd love to see the points flash according to their subject matter. Red for
war, blue for peace/neutral.

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tyng
This is a very Western-centric view of world history to say the least.

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ig1
When Tom and Gareth built the original version of this at History Hackday in
London they mentioned it in their presentation (it was being filmed so I
presume it's online somewhere?) - it's based on the English Wikipedia data so
it's skewed to a English speaking world view.

Although even more generally European and Asian history (as academic fields)
have been much more deeply studied than African history.

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godawful
Just wanted to post here and say thanks for all the comments.

Our hack day code is here: <https://github.com/gareth-lloyd/visualizing-
events>

I posted datasets here: <http://www.ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-
world-100-seconds/>

You're all right about the biases etc. All I can do is throw up my hands and
say that's what our algorithm told us :)

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cryptoz
EDIT: Yay, title's been fixed. I'll leave my post here for context.

The title isn't very accurate, or at least it assumes a lot about the reader.
I expected to begin about 4 billion years ago, for the entire history of our
world. Or perhaps the beginning of humans, a few million years ago. Or perhaps
human civilization, a few tens of thousands of years ago. Not a measily 2500
years ago dealing with the West.

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danw
The title appears to be a play on the BBC's popular A History of the World in
100 Objects: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/>.

Also the bias highlights the flaw in the underlying data which is the English
version of wikipedia

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godawful
You're right about the title.

As for the chosen time period, it's really very simple. We had limited time,
and English-language Wikipedia has year pages going back as far as 500BC.
Before that, years are grouped into decades and centuries - it would have been
possible to parse those too, but hey, limited time.

