One World Map Shows All The Battles Fought In The Last 4,000 Years

Pim van Bree and Geert Kessels are founders of LAB1100, a research and development firm based in The Hague, in the Netherlands.

Working together with universities and research institutes, LAB1100 has built digital research platforms and interactive data visualisations.

They produced the visualisation of all the logged locations and dates of conflicts dating back thousands of years, by using data harvested by DBpedia as well as data entered into Wikidata, which reflected entries related to battles in Wikipedia.

You can also view an interactive version of this map here.

This is what the map below explains about the India’s history.

Van Bree and Kessels told indy100:

We noticed the wealth of structured data that is currently available through Wikidata and DBpedia and wanted to use this data to create a captivating visualisation using nodegoat.

What we found interesting in the resulting visualisation is the western and Eurocentric overrepresentation in this dataset. Obviously, this is a result of the way this dataset has been created, both technically as well as in written history.

Van Bree and Kessels also stated that some of the data were based on automation processes, which led to anomalies:

Under the current state of what would be defined as a battle, the 2008 UEFA Cup Final riots in Manchester have been defined as ‘military conflict’.

Image Source: Nodegoat.