Original title: D-PLACE: A Global Database of Cultural, Linguistic and Environmental Diversity
D-PLACE is an open database that brings together information about the places, languages, cultures, and environments of over 1,400 human societies. It helps link records even when different sources use different names for the same group. Users can explore relationships on maps or language trees, and download the results. Researchers can use it to investigate what shapes cultural patterns, such as shared history or environmental conditions.
Imagine sorting family recipes gathered from many relatives. Some recipes use different names for the same dish, and each person remembers a different place or time for it. In this paper, the recipes stand for cultural records, while D-PLACE links records across names and sources so people can compare them with language, place, and environment.
Cultural information is often scattered across local accounts and hard-to-access sources, making comparisons difficult. D-PLACE gives the public and researchers a shared way to explore how cultural practices relate to place, language, environment, and other societies.
The abstract describes D-PLACE as a resource for exploring and analysing cultural diversity, but does not report specific findings about what drives cultural change. It does not provide measures of data completeness, accuracy, or coverage limits beyond stating that it includes information on over 1,400 societies.
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D-PLACE: A Global Database of Cultural, Linguistic and Environmental Diversity — Kathryn R. Kirby, Russell David Gray, Simon J. Greenhill et al. — PLoS ONE — doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0158391
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.