The history of the world in 100 seconds

Have a look at this 100 second video produced by Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin. It shows the location and dates of 14,238 historical events between 499 B.C. and 2011 A.D., as recorded by Wikipedia, using only the entries that had geotagging information. From Lloyd's blog:

A static map version on the dataset

"The 'spotlight' is an overlay on the video that tries to keep about 90% of the datapoints within the bright area. It takes a moving average of all the latitudes and longitudes over the past 50 or so years and centres on the mean coordinate. I love the way it opens up, first resembling medieval maps of "The World" which included only Europe and some of Asia, then encompassing "The New World" and finally resembling a modern map."

This is obviously a very Eurocentric, and there are some large gaps in the dataset, but it's very interesting non-the-less.Watch it to the end to get the full effect.


A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.