It’s enough to put an old-fashioned family tree to shame. A visualization of the migration routes of more than 150,000 people, from 600 BC to the present day, brings to life human history in the Western world in an engrossing and novel way.
The model, produced by Maximilian Schich, at the University of Texas at Dallas, along with collaborators from the U.S., Switzerland and Hungary, represents the birth and death dates and locations of individual people. These data came from community database Freebase, a well-known German encyclopedia of the world’s artists, and Getty’s online artist names database.
The sample included such notable individuals as David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, but, since Freebase is editable by anyone, it also included average folk. “You will have people where we know that there was a carpenter in Nuremberg, who lived from 1530 to 1590 say, where people know the birth ...
