ERC funds study into global cultural history

The European Research Council (ERC) has funded a study addressing the challenge of quantifying and transforming the history of culture into visual representation.

Dr Maximilian Schich, associate professor of Arts and Technology at the University of Texas, Dallas, has brought together a team of network and complexity scientists to create and quantify a big picture of European and North American cultural history.

He reconstructed the migration and mobility patterns of more than 150,000 notable individuals over a time span of 2,000 years. By connecting the birth and death locations of each individual, Schich and his team have made progress in our understanding of large-scale cultural dynamics.

“The study draws a surprisingly comprehensive picture of European and North American cultural interaction that can’t be otherwise achieved without consulting vast amounts of literature or combing discrete data sets,” Schich said. “This study functions like a macroscope, where quantitative inquiry and qualitative inquiry complement each other.”

Schich and his colleagues collected the birth and death data from three databases to track migration networks in and out of Europe and North America, revealing a pattern of geographical birth sources and death attractors.

A key finding in the study, Schich said, is that non-intuitive fundamental patterns – including the so-called ‘laws of migration’ – emerge from large numbers of specific events. The team also found evidence for massive fluctuations on a level of single specific locations.

“In practice, this means that cultural history is both an event discipline, where qualitative inquiry focuses on the specific, and a law discipline, where quantification helps to understand general patterns,” Schich said.