A group of researchers have developed a massive database which gathers information on factors such as places, languages, culture and environment which led to 1400 human societies. Called 'D-Place' and accessible at https://d-place.org, the site shows the extent to which cultural diversity patterns are shaped by different forces, such as shared history, demography, migration, diffusion, cultural innovations and environmental and ecological conditions, as the creators explained in an article published in the PLOS One journal.
A group of researchers have developed a massive database which gathers information on factors such as places, languages, culture and environment which led to 1400 human societies. Called 'D-Place' and accessible at https://d-place.org, the site shows the extent to which cultural diversity patterns are shaped by different forces, such as shared history, demography, migration, diffusion, cultural innovations and environmental and ecological conditions, as the creators explained in an article published in the PLOS One journal.
The base mainly includes information about pre-industrial societies that were described by ethnographers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Most of the coded data was extracted from two cultural databases: the Ethnographic Atlas and the Binford hunter-gatherer data, explained the lead study author, Kathryn Kirby.
According to the co-author, Fiona Jordan, the database provides three main categories of cultural studies: exploratory, predictive and evolutionary analysis.
It also gathers cultural information that previously was only available in disparate and relatively inaccessible repositories, she added.
By linking this data, particularly ethnographic sources of a focal time and place, D-Place enables the user to define their own evolutionary 'units' and decide how they should be combined for cross-cultural analysis.
To do this, those entering the site should look for cultural practices, for example: monogamy against polygamy, environmental variables such as altitude, the average annual temperature, as well as language family or area.
The search results can be displayed on a map, a tree or a table of the language, and can be download for further study.
Source: PL