Massive open-access database on human cultures created
Mon Jul 11 2016 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Massive open-access database on human cultures created
11 July 2016
An international team of researchers has developed a website at d-place.org to help answer long-standing questions about the forces that shaped human cultural diversity.
Across the world, human cultures differ enormously, from the foods people eat to the games they teach their children. But the factors and processes that drive cultural change remain largely unknown.
The open-access D-PLACE database brings together a body of dispersed information on the language, geography, culture and environment of more than 1400 human societies, mainly pre-industrial societies described by ethnographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
It will allow users to search across a range of variables including cultural practices, environment, language family or region. Language family data contains information on early human cultures such as Indo-European or Austronesian and the database includes information on regions across the globe, from Polynesia to Siberia.
The team behind the project includes researchers in a diverse range of research areas, such as linguistics, anthropology, ethnobiology, evolutionary ecology and biogeography.
The team’s paper on D-PLACE is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Professor Russell Gray from the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History based in Jena, Germany, says D-PLACE is designed to appeal to a broad user base.
“We envision D-PLACE will be useful to a whole new generation of scholars who want to try and answer long-standing questions about the forces that have shaped human cultural diversity,” he says.
“D-PLACE brings together in one place a wide range of data which can not only be linked to a specific time and place but displayed on a map, a language tree or in a table and can be downloaded for further analysis.”
The database can be found at d-place.org.
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