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Big Data Reveals How Cities Beckoned the Brainy for 2,000 Years

United Kingdom Architecture News - Aug 05, 2014 - 11:53   2102 views

Historical figures have moved to cities in the same way for centuries.

Big Data Reveals How Cities Beckoned the Brainy for 2,000 Years

Paris, shown above in a photo from 1936, has been a magnet for migration for the past 500 years.Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic

How do you keep them down on the farm, once they've seen Paris? You don't, suggests a study of 150,000 historical figures that shows cities have long acted as cultural magnets.

The brainy headed away from the hinterlands in the same migratory patterns centuries ago as they do today, finds a Science journal study released on Thursday. (Read "Population 7 Billion" in National Geographic magazine.)

"We can watch Paris become the cultural center in France before 1500, while in Germany many cities become cultural centers," says study lead authorMaximilian Schich of the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson. "And we can ask, why?"

In the past decade, some data scientists have looked to science to understand history, borrowing tools from disciplines such as ecology and statistics to answer questions like when (and how) Rome ceded its throne as Europe's cultural capital to Paris. The new study is part of this trend: It offers an extremely detailed look at the cultural movements of the past 2,000 years, pointing to a new data-driven way to conduct historical research and map the migration of people over time. (Related: "The Human Journey: Migration Routes.").....Continue Reading

> via National Geographic