- Total plug but this year I scraped 400,000 wikipedia pages with Gemini to create landnotes.org, an atlas where you can ask "what happened in Japan in 1923":
https://landnotes.org/?location=xnd284b0-6&date=1923&strictD...
https://github.com/Zulko/landnotes
My plan has been to overlay historical map borders on top of it, like the Geacron one from this post, but they all seem to be protected by copyright - and understandably so, given the amount of work involved.
- Cool project, but seems to be abandoned. At one point I was a subscriber to their premium version, but then started getting spam to the (unique) email address I used for the subscription. I emailed them to warn that their account database might be compromised but never heard back from them (this was back in '22).
Also, back then, their map tiles loading had a very high failure rate when loading, so I wrote a custom caching proxy to make it tolerable (which had built-in retry and also cached any successful response for a very long time).
- I always wanted something like a "History of human progress" which when zoomed out shows me something like this:
-2000000 Stone tools
-1000000 Using fire
-6000 Metal tools
-6000 Agriculture
-4000 Writing
1550 Printing
1888 Telephones
1888 Cars
1903 Planes
1941 Penicillin
1941 First computer
1982 Homecomputers
1983 Mobile phones
1990 The internet
2001 Wikipedia
2004 Facebook
2007 IPhone
2022 ChatGPT
And then I can zoom in on particular areas of time and see smaller milestones.
- I don't think having the Scoti in the northeast of what is now Scotland from 300 BC to 1 BC inclusive is right. I don't think the term appeared until ~300 AD, and it originally applied to people from Ireland: it only later came to be applied to the inhabitants of northern Britain when Irish became commonly spoken there (whether by immigration, conquest, or deliberate self-Gaelicisation under the influence of Irish missionaries).
by 7373737373
1 subcomments
- I've been having fun with the following AI prompt recently:
> You roleplay as the various Ancient Roman (Year 0) people I encounter as an accidental time traveler. Respond in a manner and in a language they would actually use to respond to me. Describe only what I can hear and see and sense in English, never translate or indicate what others are trying to say. I am suddenly and surprisingly teleported back in time and space, wearing normal clothes, jeans, socks and a t-shirt into the rural outskirts of Ancient Rome.
In think this is a fun way to learn languages too.
by lordnacho
3 subcomments
- How do you make this? It doesn't seem to be like Wikipedia has coordinates or map boundaries for ancient empires, so there's no simple way to mine the data.
And if you don't mine it from somewhere, how do you know what to include? How many people will have heard enough about every part of the world to even be able to research ancient borders?
- These lovely kinds of projects always leave me wanting more. In the same way every telescope leaves me wanting a larger one. Because what they reveal is so immediately interesting.
I would love to be able to slip through time with a slider. Especially if there was enough data on the movement and geographic span of early peoples to represent their story with moving, fading in/out diffusions of color.
And now I am curious! How clearly we have pinned down migration and geographic spans for the history of all human families?
NONE of this is an actual suggestion to do any more work.
It is great as it is!
- Wonderful!
This is the type of visualization that would captivate me for hours on end on Encarta in my early teens. Granted, those were a bit more polished and engaging, but the right mix of edutainment was fascinating to my developing mind.
The world lost many of these learning experiences after Encarta went away. Wikipedia certainly has much more information and is an improvement in many ways, but it's sorely lacking this type of curated and interactive content. Information is much easier to digest when it's presented in formats beyond text and pictures. Encarta had all sorts of experiences like this, from quasi-3D environments to mini-games.
The early web was certainly a limiting factor in what could be displayed on it, but today it can deliver far richer experiences. Authors like Neal Agarwal, Bartosz Ciechanowski, Grant Sanderson, and to an extent platforms like brilliant.org, prove that this is possible. I just wish that the world's largest free encyclopedia also had this.
- I like to compare these to CENTENNIA [0,1], which was the first program like this that I ever encountered (back in 6th grade). My test, is to see whether the program records the Napoleonic wars. This one does not.
0. https://historicalatlas.com/download/
1. https://youtu.be/WFYKrNptzXw?t=64
by kbrannigan
7 subcomments
- The issue is that the timeline is built in a Eurocentric way. Europe (and the Near East) are shown as the starting point of history, while Africa, Asia, and the Americas only appear when Europeans make contact with them.
This hides thousands of years of independent development in those regions—empires, and creates the false impression that they had no real history before Europe showed up.
It repeats an old colonial story where Europe is the main character and everyone else is treated as secondary.
by xenocratus
1 subcomments
- Not very "technically accurate", since it does not represent (at least some?) vassal states differently from their suzerain. For example, compare this [1] map of the Ottoman Empire with the one in this atlas.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/OttomanE...
- Seeing that it fails to portray the current map accurately, by not to separating PRC and ROC (taiwan), makes me question everything about older data
- Similar alternative https://www.runningreality.org/
by OtherShrezzing
0 subcomment
- I’d always wanted the World War 2 channel on YouTube to do something like this. They’ve produced incredibly actuate moving borders of every day of WWII for their videos. They’d be a useful historical tool if they were published as an interactive map.
- Clearly a British concoction... United States doesn't start here until 1784! :)
- related: https://ideas.zudiay.me/
- I checked only North Africa: several mistakes (even inaccuracies in terminology such as showing Berbers and Tuaregs as if they are distinct population groups)
- Hey I have something similar!
https://historicborders.app
- mm..I wish there was a really immersive version of this, something that looked like the map in Crusader Kings 3 but which let you zoom in on what was actually going on in every place at every time. I'm a map junkie and collector, and like to read historical atlases cover to cover. This is cool but it could be so much richer. I didn't take the time to seek out inaccuracies.
- Cool but the white areas are so annoying. How little we know about all the undiscovered empires destined to be forgotten forever…
- It would be great if we could get private funding to make this dataset opensource.
- Wrongly shows the Romanian Principalities as "part of the Ottoman Empire". Fact: they were never part of the Ottoman Empire. Serbia and Bulgaria were, but not Wallachia Moldavia or Transylvania.
Hard next for me.
- Crimea is shown Russian here. I'm questioning the data source.
- cool
- [flagged]
by jason-richar15
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
- Tibet? Never existed?
Meh.
- Unfortunately, the bold title of that "project" doesn't hold well to subject that it pretends to cover. Maybe not complete, but that should be stated.
For example - why since 3000 BC? Why "World History", the World started 3000 BC? I can continue about the mixing of "states" and populations" neither of which is complete on that map.
I would get this as a nice try, but in reality it looks like a school assignment project.
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