This is a wonderful video infographic that represents written history from 499BC to the present. Wikipedia includes 14,238 articles with historic events and map coordinates. As part of Mat Patterson’s History Hackaday, Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin constructed this dramatic show.
From Gareth’s blog,
This is based on the thing that me and Tom Martin built at Matt Patterson’s History Hackday. To make it, I built a python SAX Parser that sliced and diced an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. We managed to pair up 14,238 events with locations, and Tom wrote some Java to fiddle about with the coordinates and output frames. I’ve hacked around some more to add animation, because, you know, why not?