title: Quantitative social science. A network framework of cultural history.
abstract: The emergent processes driving cultural history are a product of complex interactions among large numbers of individuals, determined by difficult-to-quantify historical conditions. To characterize these processes, we have reconstructed aggregate intellectual mobility over two millennia through the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 notable individuals. The tools of network and complexity theory were then used to identify characteristic statistical patterns and determine the cultural and historical relevance of deviations. The resulting network of locations provides a macroscopic perspective of cultural history, which helps us to retrace cultural narratives of Europe and North America using large-scale visualization and quantitative dynamical tools and to derive historical trends of cultural centers beyond the scope of specific events or narrow time intervals.
authors.affiliation: School of Arts and Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA. Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation (SOMS), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland. Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics, Biology and Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA. maximilian.schich@utdallas.edu.
authors.forename: Maximilian
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schich
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Miami Coral Gables, Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA.
authors.forename: Chaoming
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: School for Informatics and Computing, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
authors.forename: Yong-Yeol
authors.initials: YY
authors.lastname: Ahn
authors.affiliation: Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation (SOMS), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mirsky
authors.affiliation: Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics, Biology and Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
authors.forename: Mauro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Martino
authors.affiliation: Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics, Biology and Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA. Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA 02115, USA. Center for Network Science, Central European University, Budapest 1052, Hungary.
authors.forename: Albert-László
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Barabási
authors.affiliation: Chair of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation (SOMS), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Helbing
mesh_terms: D003468:Cultural Evolution; D016208:Databases, Factual; D003644:Death Certificates; D005060:Europe; D005197:Famous Persons; D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services; D009656:North America; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D012942:Social Sciences / Q000639:trends*; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis