Thoughts on an Article from Science 'A network framework of cultural history'

Apparently, this is an excellent interdisciplinary study. This paper drawn on a simple but large database that contains notable individuals in Europe and North America over two thousand years, analyzed their migration activities by utilizing tools and metrics from the domain of computer science, demography, linguistic studies, etc., and finally obtained many interesting insights and findings.

Birth and death data of notable individuals reveal interactions between culturally relevant locations over two millennia by Schich et al.(2014)

The structure of this paper is sound, clear and approachable, as many other articles published in Science magazine always are. In the first paragraph, this paper presents the research problem clearly. With the emphasis on the many implications of quantifying historical developments as the beginning, It says, 'there is inherent tension between qualitative analyze of individual accounts and quantitative approaches...'. Then, the authors indicate the data source of this paper and describe them in detail. The paragraphs that followed are the major parts of this paper in which the authors condense their findings into three figures. All the stories and explications revolve around the three figures. The first figure, as its name suggests, focuses on the interactions between cultural locations by connecting the locations with birth and death of notable individuals. This figure has a impact on me because it shows a lot of implications for urban researches, place making and promotion, which I would explain later. The second figure reveals global patterns and local instabilities in human mobility dynamics. As the authors says in the paper, several insights found in this study are in line with some empirical laws such as Heaps' law, Zip's law and Ravenstein's laws of migration. As for figure 3, it did a fantastic visualization job which offers a meta-narrative of cultural history. In the end of this paper, the authors utilized the Google Ngram English data set and conducted a match between the historical cultural events and the death rate patterns.
The methodology of this paper is worth noting. As the author says in the first paragraph, this paper adopted a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative tools. The authors use the quantitative methods to identify the statistical regularities, which are presented in figure 1 and figure 2 in this paper, and then use qualitative approaches to delineate the meta-narrative of cultural history in figure 3. In addition to this mixed and complementary methods, this paper employed a lot of metrics from other domain of disciplines. For example, PageRank, a metric that measures centrality of a network in computational technology, is used to denote the relative importance of cultural locations. This shows the power of inter-disciplinary studies.
This paper has intrigued me. I can't help think that, why not do a similar study in China, during a specific period, on a specific group of people? This idea agrees with the authors' final statement without prior consultation, in which the authors says, "Our approach allows for cross-fertilization of domain knowledge into other domains, periods, and geographic areas." Therefore, I plan to propose the following study:
"Chinese Cities and Chinese Elites' Migration in Chinese History"
Thousands of Chinese Elites in ancient China have shaped the Chinese history, as well as Chinese cities...
[Anyone who is interested please contact me at jazzyl@qq.com]