Northeastern University researchers map 2,000 years of cultural migration:
[The researchers] tracked the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 intellectuals (culled from several databases, including the General Artist Lexicon, the Getty Union List of Artist Names, and Freebase) in Europe and America over the span of the last two millennia. They then visualized the results by mapping the geographical trajectories of these artists and thinkers over their lifetime, marking birth places in blue and death places in red.
Compare and contrast with this Stanford visualization of Voltaire’s Enlightenment-era social network, The Republic of Letters.