World Civilizations from Network Analysis

People like to divide the world into different societies or civilizations. The division between the First World, Second World, and Third World used to be common. And there are those who speak of the North-South divide. Can we use network analysis to create any sort of division between "civilizations"?

Two years ago, Kalev Leetaru did just that. Within a larger paper, he examined news articles and based on co-occurrence of countries in articles, made a network map. Leetaru then used standard community detection methods to determine which countries cluster together more than would be expected by chance. And here's what you get:

Here's a description of this from the paper:

Group 1, which roughly encompasses the Asiatic and Australian regions, has largely positive links to the rest of the world and is the only group with a positive connection to Group 4 (Middle East). Group 3 (Africa) has no positive links to any other civilization, while Group 2 (North and South America excluding Canada) has negative links to all but Group 1. As opposed to explicit measures of conflict or cooperation based on armed conflict or trade ties, this approach captures the latent view of conflict and cooperation as portrayed by the world’s news media.

Lots more in the original paper, including another civilization division using the New York Times.