Open-Access Human Cultures Database Now Available

Massive Open-Access Database on Human Cultures Created

PhysOrg | July 8, 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.
D-PLACE - the Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment - is an expandable, open access database that brings together a dispersed body of information on the language, geography, culture and environment of more than 1,400 human societies. It comprises information mainly on pre-industrial societies that were described by ethnographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The team's paper on D-PLACE is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

Source; https://d-place.org/home

"Norms of domestic organization vary substantially among the world's cultural groups. For the global sample of societies in D-PLACE, a nearly equal number tend towards single-generation as multi-generation (extended family) households. D-PLACE allows local norms to be considered in terms of the practices of neighbouring societies, environmental conditions, and shared ancestry, as represented by historic linguistic relationships among societies (shown here for Sino-Tibetan societies)." Source: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-massive-open-access-database-human-cultures.html

<more at http://phys.org/news/2016-07-massive-open-access-database-human-cultures.html; related articles and links: https://d-place.org/home (D-PLACE: Database of Places, Language, Culture and Evnironment website) and http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158391 (D-PLACE: A Global Database of Cultural, Linguistic and Environmental Diversity. Kathryn R. Kirby, Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Fiona M. Jordan, Stephanie Gomes-Ng, Hans-Jörg Bibiko, Damián E. Blasi, Carlos A. Botero, Claire Bowern, Carol R. Ember, Dan Leehr, Bobbi S. Low, Joe McCarter, William Divale, and Michael C. Gavin.  Published: July 8, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158391. [Abstract: From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. This expandable and open-access database (accessible at https://d-place.org) brings together a dispersed corpus of information on the geography, language, culture, and environment of over 1400 human societies. We aim to enable researchers to investigate the extent to which patterns in cultural diversity are shaped by different forces, including shared history, demographics, migration/diffusion, cultural innovations, and environmental and ecological conditions. We detail how D-PLACE helps to overcome four common barriers to understanding these forces: i) location of relevant cultural data, (ii) linking data from distinct sources using diverse ethnonyms, (iii) variable time and place foci for data, and (iv) spatial and historical dependencies among cultural groups that present challenges for analysis. D-PLACE facilitates the visualisation of relationships among cultural groups and between people and their environments, with results downloadable as tables, on a map, or on a linguistic tree. We also describe how D-PLACE can be used for exploratory, predictive, and evolutionary analyses of cultural diversity by a range of users, from members of the worldwide public interested in contrasting their own cultural practices with those of other societies, to researchers using large-scale computational phylogenetic analyses to study cultural evolution. In summary, we hope that D-PLACE will enable new lines of investigation into the major drivers of cultural change and global patterns of cultural diversity.])>