In search of cultural capitals
Continuing from previous post Visualizing historical influencers, today I looked into the birthplaces of the most significant historical figures. The data collected by Project Pantheon on cultural export based on wikipedia views include notable person born between BC3500 to AD2005, and cover loads of locations, though most of the records are tilted towards Europe, America and Asia.
As such, I intend to get a rough idea of where are the centers of cultural influence, based on clusters of cities weighted by the Historical Popularity Index. I cleaned up some coordinates with are off the grid via filtering by the boundary of the continents.
Asia
Europe
Americas
By Industry
While the maps above would give an overall idea of where the actions were, the question remain on my mind is: where were the center of influence for sciences, arts and sports?
With the understanding that the dataset has more records in Europe to start with, we breakdown the number of historical figures by industries and binned influence range.
While Europe historical figures still dominates, we can see America is most notable in film and theatre, and South America stands out in team sports, especially soccar. Asia is the only region with widely influential figures in martial arts on wikipedia, examples include Ip (Yip) Man.
This is #day79 of my #100dayprojects on data science and visual storytelling. What I learnt today is how to find centroids on map. Thanks for reading. If you like it, please share it. Suggestions of new topics and feedbacks are always welcomed.
