History of the [Western] world in 100 seconds [According to Wikipedia]
flowingdata.com
flowingdata.com
Although even more generally European and Asian history (as academic fields) have been much more deeply studied than African history.
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 :)
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.
Also the bias highlights the flaw in the underlying data which is the English version of wikipedia
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.
Have we really had anything that qualifies as civilization for that long? I'd have though that 7000 years was more like it.
"History" means written records. That's why 3.999994 of those 4 billion years fall under prehistory.