Geographic touchpoints

The concept of geographic touchpoints, a term popularized by Gregory Kohs, is the association of points on the Earth's surface with significant events in history. In this Wikiversity learning resource, we wish to build a database that associates four significant events in a person's history (birth, education, work, and death) with the corresponding touchpoints on the globe.

How to participate

Everyone is welcome to join in building this learning resource in one or more of the following ways:

Database development

Add your personal geographic touchpoints to the database below
Add the verifiable geographic touchpoints of other individuals (try to diversify the sample)
Proof, corroborate, and update existing touchpoints in the database

Analyze the database

Using any method or software of your choosing, try to determine how these geographic touchpoints might tell a larger story.

Do individuals with a lower income have a smaller geographic footprint over their lifespan?
Do males or females travel farther from their birthplace to receive their highest education?
Are people born more recently more mobile over their lifespan? If so, how much more in terms of miles expanded per decade of cohort births?
Etc., etc., etc. Let your imagination wander!

Details

The Geographic touchpoints initiative will be a collection of coordinate mapping data for four key events in a person's lifetime:

Birth - Place of birth
School - Where engaged in most advanced phase of formal education (to date)
Work - Where performed highest-paid phase of employment (to date)
Death - Where subject reasonably wishes for remains to be interred or scattered, or (in case of death) actual interment place

You may wish to use iTouchMap to assist in finding latitude and longitude coordinates.

Additional data points are requested from contributors, so that a more robust analysis may be accomplished. These are:

Year of birth - YYYY
Gender - M or F
Highest level of education (to date) - NHS (did not complete high school); HS (high school diploma); SC (some college); C (college degree); GS (graduate study); G (graduate degree).
Household income (current quintile for the country where work touchpoint was performed) - 1 (lowest class); 2 (lower middle); 3 (middle); 4 (upper middle); 5 (highest class).

You may enter data about yourself, or about well-documented individuals of wider notability. It is believed that substantial insights may be gained from the detailed analysis of this data, once the sample set contains at least 1,000 members.

Assistance

If you are too confused (or lazy!) to enter your data into the table, feel free to just leave your information in text form on the discussion page, and someone will be along shortly to look up and plug in your coordinate data.

Database

**Geographic touchpoints data**
Name (optional)	BIRTH	SCHOOL	WORK	DEATH	Birth Year	Gender	Education	Income
Gregory Kohs	42.250706, -84.39252	39.981420, -75.152621	39.954398, -75.16858	36.045948, -81.895754	1968	M	G	5
J.L.	35.600945, -82.554015	35.904312, -79.05001	51.500152, -0.126236		1980	M	G	4
J.A.	38.268215, 140.869356	42.728345, -84.474075	29.310000, -94.781284		1949	M	G
Erkan Yilmaz	48.89, 8.7138	49.011115, 8.414312	49.008052, 8.399938		1976	M	G
Albert Einstein	48.399623, 9.996607	47.374722, 8.548333	40.331667, -74.667778	40.3310617, -74.667993	1879	M	G	5
Marilyn Monroe	34.05939, -118.20847	34.045073, -118.459345	34.05556, -118.41694	34.058347, -118.441135	1926	F	HS	5
Mariano Melgar	-16.398822, -71.536886	-12.043333, -77.028333	-16.398822, -71.536886	-15.843333, -70.023611	1791	M	G

Musical inspiration

If you wish, enjoy the music video Birth, School, Work, Death by The Godfathers.