Impressive visualization, but I'd love to see it overlaid on an actual world map for geographic context.

I'd love to see the points flash according to their subject matter. Red for war, blue for peace/neutral.

This is a very Western-centric view of world history to say the least.

When Tom and Gareth built the original version of this at History Hackday in London they mentioned it in their presentation (it was being filmed so I presume it's online somewhere?) - it's based on the English Wikipedia data so it's skewed to a English speaking world view.

Although even more generally European and Asian history (as academic fields) have been much more deeply studied than African history.

I guess that's 'cause the West has the most geotagged Wikipedia articles with time attached...

That's exactly what I was thinking. This is more of an interesting commentary on Wikipedia articles than any kind of accurate view of world history.

Just wanted to post here and say thanks for all the comments.

Our hack day code is here: https://github.com/gareth-lloyd/visualizing-events

I posted datasets here: http://www.ragtag.info/2011/feb/2/history-world-100-seconds/

You're all right about the biases etc. All I can do is throw up my hands and say that's what our algorithm told us :)

EDIT: Yay, title's been fixed. I'll leave my post here for context.

The title isn't very accurate, or at least it assumes a lot about the reader. I expected to begin about 4 billion years ago, for the entire history of our world. Or perhaps the beginning of humans, a few million years ago. Or perhaps human civilization, a few tens of thousands of years ago. Not a measily 2500 years ago dealing with the West.

"I expected to begin about 4 billion years ago, for the entire history of our world."

"History" means written records. That's why 3.999994 of those 4 billion years fall under prehistory.

The title appears to be a play on the BBC's popular A History of the World in 100 Objects: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/.

Also the bias highlights the flaw in the underlying data which is the English version of wikipedia

You're right about the title.

As for the chosen time period, it's really very simple. We had limited time, and English-language Wikipedia has year pages going back as far as 500BC. Before that, years are grouped into decades and centuries - it would have been possible to parse those too, but hey, limited time.

"a few tens of thousands of years"

Have we really had anything that qualifies as civilization for that long? I'd have though that 7000 years was more like it.