[HN Gopher] Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC
___________________________________________________________________
Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC
Author : not_knuth
Score : 271 points
Date : 2025-11-20 09:52 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (geacron.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (geacron.com)
| dghf wrote:
| 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).
| arethuza wrote:
| Indeed, and having the "Scoti" replaced by the "Picts" isn't
| terribly accurate?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata
|
| Edit: The "Scots" are supposed to have conquered the Picts in
| the mid 9th century leading to what would eventually become
| Scotland.
| dghf wrote:
| More recently, the idea that the Picts conquered the Scots
| (which they'd done once before, in the eighth century) and
| adopted their language (something which they seem to have
| already started on) has gained ground.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| 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.
| Ampned wrote:
| Reminds me of this book for children I read when I was was
| young:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/974324.Crusade_in_Jeans
| grosswait wrote:
| Sounds like a really interesting story, but the reviews of
| the English edition by Dutch and German speakers leaves me
| wondering Is there a better English translation available?
| It's hard to tell from the reviews if there's only one.
| xenocratus wrote:
| 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...
| prmph wrote:
| Yes, there are several errors. For example, the Gold Coast did
| not include any part of German/French Togoland. The Gold Coast
| added some of that territory when it became Ghana in 1957
| juleiie wrote:
| Cool but the white areas are so annoying. How little we know
| about all the undiscovered empires destined to be forgotten
| forever...
| Yizahi wrote:
| There were no unknown empires at the white areas, no forgotten
| ancient civilizations.
| Nevermark wrote:
| 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!
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| pastage wrote:
| If everything is in Wikidata then you can probably do that. It
| is always going to be a bit hard to get the polish of the data
| there.
|
| I am a firm believer in that good visualization gives you
| better data. You can probably get a lot of detail mapping of
| data in wikidata if you make a map that queries "things
| happening in BBX during these years)
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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?
| Yizahi wrote:
| I guess something like this - add timelines for every known
| point (city, landmark, ritual site etc.) connect the dots in
| the same year with one another, then apply some reasonable
| territory estimate to round out the resulting blob, correct for
| visible mistakes manually.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Just for fun, how would you envision this process working for
| empires that weren't based on territorial control of cities
| and landmarks like the Mongols, or based on territorial
| control of land at all like the Hansa?
| zamadatix wrote:
| This is the same question as "How would the information even
| get put into something like Wikipedia in the first place" -
| knowledgeable people in the field do the work of aggregating
| academic information and turn it into a database of sorts. This
| seems to be accomplished in this case by running it as a
| business with a founder who has a degree in geography and
| history + a team of variously skilled people (history + tech +
| business).
| netsharc wrote:
| It's a very fine-grained data, isn't it... Something like on
| August 24, 1652, 17:34 local, soldier X killed the last
| tribesman Y they were fighting and claimed the area for his
| king Z. And a lot of regions were/are disputed with no clear
| "ruler", e.g. the no man's land between North and South Korea.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I remember the old CIV games used to have a replay map of the
| entire world history, that was pretty cool.
| kbrannigan wrote:
| 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.
| nflekkhnnn wrote:
| No it does not imply that.
| pell wrote:
| Similarly overlooked is the philosophy of the Americas before
| European colonization. A great read I recommend to anyone who's
| interested: " Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in
| Motion" by James Maffie
|
| It obviously only focuses on the Aztecs so hardly a deep dive
| on all there is to learn.
| nuggetzs wrote:
| Thanks for the rec!
| usrnm wrote:
| The map certainly is not built in a eurocentric way. It does
| reflect the fact that the political history of Eurasia and the
| Mediterranean region are much better studied and better
| understood, but this is hardly the fault of the creator of the
| map. Do you have a better political map of the Americas two
| thousand years ago?
| zamadatix wrote:
| There was a free alternative to this which always seemed to
| try more in this regard https://www.runningreality.org/#11/20
| /500&22.59154,-2.58791&... but I've never actually known
| enough to say it was actually more accurate or not. At least
| towards the ~1600s the Americas look a lot more like the
| history books I saw in school.
| kbrannigan wrote:
| The timeline spans "3000 BC" to now, but BC/CE itself is a
| European framework. The Han Dynasty, Maya, and Kingdom of
| Kush all had their own calendars and ways of marking
| significant time. Yet this "world" history uses Europe's
| reference point as universal.
|
| So yes, the map reflects available documentation. But the
| very framework - organizing all human history around BC/CE -
| already embeds a European perspective. The bias isn't what
| the mapmaker included; it's that European systems became the
| unmarked "standard" for measuring when history happens.
| That's structural Eurocentrism: not intentional, but built
| into the tools we inherit.
| vman81 wrote:
| I'll allow it.
| igogq425 wrote:
| That's an extremely weak argument. Ultimately, it's about
| the numerical values. Where you set the reference point is
| secondary as long as you can convert. We could also set
| your birthday as the zero point. I'm not a Christian and I
| have to live with BC/CE too. I'm not saying that there is
| no Eurocentric perspective or that European understanding
| of history is not shaped by it. But we can reflect on this
| and correct it. Postcolonial criticism should not go so far
| as to see the BC/CE system as a structural mechanism of
| oppression. That's just ridiculous. You'd be better off
| dealing with concrete economic oppression instead of
| peddling this Foucault/Spivak/Said nonsense! Sorry for
| being so blunt, but it upsets me every time. I mean, what's
| the alternative here? Should we switch to the Mayan
| calendar now so that it's not so Eurocentric? That's
| ridiculous. A little Hegelianism (or Laoziism, for that
| matter) wouldn't hurt you!
| adwn wrote:
| The Gregorian calendar is _the_ de-facto global calendar
| system today, even in cultures and states that are far
| removed from its Christian and European roots. You might as
| well complain about the text on the website being in
| English.
| prmph wrote:
| But he is _not_ complaining that we use the Gregorian
| calendar. He is pointing out that is just one calendar
| among many, and we should be aware that it is a conscious
| choice the world has made to use it by convention.
| adwn wrote:
| > _But he is not complaining that we use the Gregorian
| calendar._
|
| Yes, he is:
|
| >>> _Yet this "world" history uses Europe's reference
| point [of BC/CE] as universal._
|
| It wouldn't make sense to use any other than the
| Gregorian calendar for this map, and it also wouldn't
| make sense to mix different calendar systems.
|
| > _He is pointing out that is just one calendar among
| many [...]_
|
| But it's not. The Gregorian calendar is _the_ calendar in
| world wide use today. Giving dates in BC /CE is not an
| expression of Eurocentrism, it simply reflects reality.
| prmph wrote:
| You are making bad faith straw-man arguments.
|
| > Yet this "world" history uses Europe's reference point
| [of BC/CE] as universal.
|
| What in this sentence indicates he think is it _wrong_ to
| use that calendar? He is saying it is NOT universal. What
| about that is hard to understand?
|
| > The Gregorian calendar is the calendar in world wide
| use today.
|
| Again, you are arguing with a straw-man. Please read my
| comment carefully again. I am not arguing this your
| statement.
|
| As an analogy, the WWW is the dominant (probably
| virtually only) form of the internet in use today, but it
| is only one architecture. There were/can be others, but
| they failed to gain or maintain traction. A summary from
| Google:
|
| > Besides Gopher, other historical internet systems and
| protocols existed before the World Wide Web, including
| Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) and the Archie
| search engine. While the World Wide Web eventually
| surpassed them all, these systems provided different ways
| of discovering and navigating information online in the
| early 1990s.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| You're implying this is some sort of "malice". It's not that
| authors are "Biased towards Europe". The reality is that,
| sadly, there's VERY LITTLE historical records in antiquity
| besides the ones in "Europe".
|
| For example, I'm from Latin America, and the most important
| empires in South America (Incas for example) were using writing
| systems based on threads and knots (called Khipu). Sadly, these
| records didn't survive. While Mesopotamia and Northern Africa
| were already using glyphs carved in Stone (and bones, and wood,
| etc). These had a much better chance of surviving.
|
| Then, what happened, is that modern "europeans" (starting in
| 200BC, roman times) invested a lot of time to research and
| learn about History. This is something MIND BLOWING. Most
| civilizations didn't even care about their predecessors (aside
| from deity or folk tales). And that's why what we know today
| about Parthia or Greece comes mostly from European sources.
| Don't get me wrong, multiple civilizations had the concept of
| "early historians", especially Chinese and arabs. But not
| everything always survives.
| prmph wrote:
| Then don't present it as an Atlas of world history. It should
| be called an Atlas of Eurocentric history.
|
| Furthermore, we would have had much more records from non-
| european sources if many European explorers and colonialists
| had not gone on a rampage destroying whatever indigenous
| documents and history they could lay their hands on.
|
| As a Latin American I'm sure you know about how the
| conquistadors destroyed written records.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I assume people will already understand that _any_
| purported compendium of history is necessarily incomplete.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Always assume that information is unevenly distributed,
| this statement included.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| It's true, they did destroy written records (especially the
| Khipu I mentioned before).
|
| But what can the creator of this tool do? Call it "partial
| atlas of history based on what we have left after 5000
| years of wars"?
|
| It is what it is, whoever built this atlas included
| EVERYTHING[0] known or possibly known. The result might be
| Eurocentric based on all the reasons stated above, but I
| don't attribute it to malice from the creator of the tool
|
| [0] It's clearly not everything. There's knowledge of the
| Tehuelche people in my region (Patagonia, Argentina) for
| example that doesn't show up here.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The meaning of the word "history" is the study of
| historical records. The events that happened in times
| before writing are called "pre-history", and similarly the
| events that happened in places that didn't write things
| down are out of scope.
| prmph wrote:
| This is kind of missing the point.
|
| What I'm saying is there _are_ records that have either
| been ignored, neglected, or destroyed.
|
| In Mali alone there are _millions_ of historical
| documents [1] that have not been suitable explored. The
| Meroitic [2] script that contains historical records is
| still poorly understood
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meroitic_script
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| History has never been purely about studying literary
| records. Thucydides' _History_ includes gratuitous use of
| oral speeches and discussion of events that predate
| writing. I can 't think of a single modern historian who
| doesn't make use of archaeological data either.
|
| Equating history with writing is a very anachronistic
| definition that was popular among Renaissance and early
| modern historians as a way of legitimizing their
| preference for classical scholarship over the "dark"
| middle ages. It's not a good rule of thumb for what is or
| isn't historical.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| If you in ernest take a look at the whole thing you can
| clearly see how the culture of states/kingdoms slowly spread
| from Mesopotamia and China to Europe and India. Only after
| ~3000 years the Roman empire takes over and spreads this
| throughout Europe. And then another 1500 years pass until the
| European hegemony really starts.
|
| Also smaller "cultures" which do not constitute
| states/kingdoms are shown in the map, albeit without color or
| borders.
|
| But yeah. Evil Eurocentrism am I right.
| kbrannigan wrote:
| You say "culture of states slowly spread from Mesopotamia
| to Europe" but what template defines a "state"?
|
| The Kingdom of Kush existed for 3,000 years. Aksum
| controlled Red Sea trade. Great Zimbabwe built massive
| stone cities. Yet the map leaves them blank because they
| don't fit the Mesopotamian-Roman model of what states
| should look like.
| kbrannigan wrote:
| Let's consider *Sub-Saharan Africa* (itself a label that
| lumps dozens of distinct civilizations into a single "other"
| category). These societies _kept records_ not folk tales, not
| vague legends, but structured historical accounts.
|
| * The Kingdom of Kush maintained *3,000 years of king lists*.
| * Ethiopian monasteries preserved *written chronicles in
| Ge'ez* for over a millennium. * Mali's griots memorized
| *centuries of dynasty records* with such precision that
| griots from distant regions told the same histories word-for-
| word when Europeans finally documented them.
|
| Yet when do these count as "real" history? Only after
| Europeans wrote them down? Only when archaeology "confirms"
| what griots already knew?
|
| The map shows detailed Rome but blank Africa, despite these
| complex states existing for millennia. it's about whose
| preservation methods and developmental paths count as "real"
| history worth mapping.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| The Kush Kingdom was settled around the Nile, it's NOT sub-
| saharan Africa.
|
| And yes, there are a lot of historical artifacts spread out
| in the world. But how much WRITTEN and RECORDED history can
| you find? You can find a totem buried somewhere in the
| south of Argentina, so you know you had an advanced culture
| there. But can you name them? Does it have the ruler's
| name?
|
| Nobody is arguing that there were advanced civilizations
| ASIDE from Mesopotamia, China and North Africa. But we have
| very little written records to name them, classify them,
| etc.
| prmph wrote:
| Around Nile excludes sub-saharan Africa? Seems your
| knowledge of geography is a bit lacking. The Nile runs
| through 11 African countries.
|
| And, what does sub-saharan even have to do with anything
| here? Seems like a weird thing to bring up. The people of
| the Sudan (where Kush and Meroe, etc were located) are
| one of the blackest people on the planet, nobody is going
| to mistake them for Mediterranean people, as has been
| argued with Egypt, itself an African civilization that
| had strong links to other parts of Africa.
|
| It's kind of funny. Point out that there were advanced
| civilizations, writing systems, and historical record-
| keeping in various parts of Africa, and the response for
| some people is, "ah, but that's not sub-saharan Africa",
| or, "but, those were not _real_ Africans ", etc, etc.
|
| So, the definition of "real" Africa becomes: whatever
| seems to confirm your biases about what Africa is
| supposed to be, quite a circular definition.
| hulitu wrote:
| > You're implying this is some sort of "malice". It's not
| that authors are "Biased towards Europe". The reality is
| that, sadly, there's VERY LITTLE historical records in
| antiquity besides the ones in "Europe".
|
| The African map is strange. I scrolled until 1722 and it
| shows some isolated countries and the rest is white. They
| could do better. (I'm european - pale face)
| zulko wrote:
| This is also very true of the events reported in Wikipedia, see
| this animated timeline of (a hopefully representative set of)
| historical events reported in Wikipedia. Is really is "Europe
| meets the world":
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1l3xl8x/events_fro...
|
| I agree with others in this thread that this more probably
| "information-biased" than "eurocentric" on the part of the
| Atlas creator. Pretty sure they wish non-european history was
| easier to find and aggregate as it would make the project much
| more compelling (I certainly had this problem with
| https://landnotes.org/).
|
| I am hoping LLMs will do a lot of good at bridging gaps and
| surfacing world historical information that didn't make it yet
| to centralized projects like Wikipedia.
| krige wrote:
| This is a view that is way too self-flagellatory and incorrect
| if you actually use the map. The borders are included based on
| what sources are available and non-european entitities are
| documented longer than european ones, as long as they have left
| behind anything to base these borders on. When no definite
| borders can be traced, the map still offers names of dominant
| cultures in the region, in the same way whether they're, say,
| european Celts or south american Paracas.
| mxfh wrote:
| The most ignorant part of those types of projects is usually
| the projection of the idea of nation states defined by clearly
| communicated sphere of influence backwards way before the
| 1800s. That concept simply does not hold up. The uncertainty of
| borders was systemic before that and sometimes simply not a
| thing at all. Uncertainty visualization in geographic contexts
| never made it into mainstream visualizations and data formats
| so far.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala_(political_model)
| kykat wrote:
| 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
| maratc wrote:
| Both PRC and ROC maintain their sovereignty over the whole of
| mainland + islands, so this depiction is not exactly
| inaccurate.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Republic_o...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_China
| kykat wrote:
| Then it should be striped, the same way Crimea is.
| maratc wrote:
| Should Mongolia be striped too? ROC does not officially
| recognise Mongolia's sovereignty.
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_Administrative_
| a...
|
| I'll add that most of the "Internet's supporters of Taiwan
| independence" not only _do not live_ in Taiwan, they have
| never even _visited_ there -- if they did, they would know
| that even most of Taiwan 's population consider Taiwan and
| (mainland) China to be one entity. And mainland China
| mostly agrees with that -- where they _disagree_ is what is
| the political entity that should govern this territory.
| kykat wrote:
| Great straw man argument you got there, please tell me
| more about my life, I'm sure you know all about it
| kykat wrote:
| I'm sure that you can see in the map that there's "free
| are of the republic of china", which wasn't represented
| in the map, which was the point I raised originally. I
| never mentioned taiwan independence, you twist the facts
| and my word for your political agenda.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > most of Taiwan's population consider Taiwan and
| (mainland) China to be one entity
|
| I very much doubt this is true -- post a source, if
| you've got one
| maratc wrote:
| My experience is a personal one -- a couple of jobs ago I
| was travelling extensively to Taiwan (on a multi-year ROC
| visa) and had lots of conversations with people.
|
| I can offer a link to ROC constitution (above):
|
| > Because the ROC constitution is, at least nominally,
| the constitution of all China, the amendments avoided any
| specific reference to the Taiwan area ...
|
| Or this passage:
|
| > The position of the PRC and the KMT in Taiwan remains
| that there is only one sovereign entity of China, united
| and indivisible.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas#Current_sit
| uation
|
| Or this passage:
|
| > Domestically, the major political contention is between
| the Pan-Blue Coalition, which favors eventual Chinese
| unification under the ROC and promoting a pan-Chinese
| identity, ...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan
|
| Or this passage:
|
| > As of the 2008 election of President Ma Ying-jeou, the
| KMT agreed to the One China principle, but defined it as
| led by [ROC] rather than [PRC].
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_unification#Ris
| e_of_th...
|
| (KMT/Pan-Blue are the biggest party historically and
| currently, however Pan-Green were a majority recently.)
|
| Or this poll result: (2024)
| Independence as soon as possible 3.8%
| Maintain status quo, move toward independence 22.4%
| Maintain status quo, decide at a later date 27.3%
| Maintain status quo indefinitely 33.6%
|
| So about 60% are for doing nothing (either for now or
| forever), while 26% have expressed their preference for
| independence.
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_independence_mov
| ement#O...
| umanwizard wrote:
| Believing that China and Taiwan should be reunified is
| not the same as believing that they are, currently, one
| entity, which is what was originally claimed.
| maratc wrote:
| I'm not certain what exactly you address as "what was
| originally claimed," however the world maps in both PRC
| and ROC show one China, not two, and I'm not certain why
| it should be a reason to disqualify TLA on the basis that
| "it fails to portray the current map accurately, by not
| to (sic) separating PRC and ROC."
| umanwizard wrote:
| > the world maps in both PRC and ROC show one China, not
| two
|
| That is irrelevant. The map is not the territory. They
| are two countries in reality; that is, they operate as
| two separate sovereign countries in every practical way,
| regardless of what legal fictions are maintained for
| political reasons.
|
| This atlas is presumably supposed to be about reality,
| not about legal fictions.
|
| (BTW: North Korea and South Korea officially claimed to
| be one country until very recently, and South Korea still
| does. But every map in the outside world shows them as
| two. Why should China and Taiwan be treated differently?)
| maratc wrote:
| > They are two countries in reality
|
| It only looks like this from the West, where the support
| for independent Taiwan is much higher than in Taiwan
| itself (not to speak of PRC where it's non-existent.)
| People in Taiwan don't perceive China as a different
| country (the way that French perceive Germany for
| example) but rather as a different (unfortunate) regime
| over the same nation.
|
| > This atlas is presumably supposed to be about reality,
| not about legal fictions.
|
| With the current reality in east Ukraine/Georgia/Northern
| Cyprus/Israel-Palestine/Kosovo/etc.etc.etc., I'm not sure
| if it's ever possible to get a map that will satisfy
| everybody, as what is "legal fiction" to you might be
| "internationally recognised borders" for someone else.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > It only looks like this from the West, where the
| support for independent Taiwan is much higher than in
| Taiwan itself (not to speak of PRC where it's non-
| existent.) People in Taiwan don't perceive China as a
| different country (the way that French perceive Germany
| for example) but rather as a different (unfortunate)
| regime over the same nation.
|
| I think this misses the point. It doesn't matter if 0% or
| 50% or 100% of people in Taiwan or anywhere else believe
| that Taiwan is legitimately independent. That has no
| bearing on whether it _actually is_ , in practice.
|
| An "Atlas of World History" should strive to portray who
| actually controls territory in the real world, regardless
| of whether that control is "recognized" or "legitimate".
| Otherwise it is an "Atlas of Political Thought" or "Atlas
| of International Law" or something else.
|
| > With the current reality in east
| Ukraine/Georgia/Northern Cyprus/Israel-
| Palestine/Kosovo/etc.etc.etc.,
|
| Yes exactly. For the same reasons, Crimea and various
| parts of East Ukraine should be labeled as part of
| Russia, East Jerusalem and places like Ari'el should be
| labeled as part of Israel, etc. This has nothing to do
| with whether I think any of those borders would be
| "legitimate" or "legal" or what percentage of the people
| who live there accept them.
| maratc wrote:
| Then this atlas is doing a really really good job, as the
| label "Taiwan" only appears after 1949, Crimea after
| 2014, Cyprus is divided after 1974, Georgia after 2008,
| and (state of) Palestine never appears at all. However
| sibling comments seem to be offended by
| Palestine/Crimea/Tibet situation.
| kykat wrote:
| Note that in taiwan people want the status quo, not
| reunification. And nobody likes to do things when
| threatened by force, which is what the CCP is doing
| kykat wrote:
| Since you went there with a visa, I'm sure you noticed
| that the authority that issued that visa has nothing to
| do with Beijing.
|
| And since you also know that the taiwanese want to
| "maintain status quo", it's probably clear to you that
| they want to keep their full control, and not be under
| the rule of the CCP.
|
| Which makes it really interesting, why you keep argueing
| for "one china".
| kykat wrote:
| And if we are talking about the constitution, technically
| parts of Russia, India, Vietnam, Mongolia are also "claimed"
| by the ROC.
|
| This map should show the areas of actual rule and control (de
| facto) and don't accept any territory to belong to a state
| just because they claim sovereignty.
| umanwizard wrote:
| If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
|
| Four -- someone claiming something doesn't make it true.
| cdman wrote:
| 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).
| jimmydddd wrote:
| What is it supposed to do? When I click on a country, I get a
| pop up with a flag and a link to Wikipedia?
| mg wrote:
| 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.
| Jolter wrote:
| Facebook was not "human progress". Future historians will point
| to its founding as a pivotal point of regression of democracy
| and humanity.
| mg wrote:
| I put Facebook up there to point towards the beginning of
| social media.
| Jolter wrote:
| Social media was "progress" in the same sense that atomic
| weapons were.
|
| They certainly have their proponents, and they certainly
| led to measurable effects on society, so I agree their
| inventions were important. But "progress"?
| krapp wrote:
| There was social media before Facebook, though.
| Jolter wrote:
| I think if social media is WW1, then the launch of
| Facebook will be considered as the assassination of
| Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Not in itself sufficient, but a
| point that really got some important balls rolling.
| hnbad wrote:
| That wouldn't be the foundation of Facebook, that would
| be Facebook introducing the algorithmic timeline.
| Remember that Facebook explicitly considered it a success
| because it increased "engagement" while the vast majority
| of its users reacted negatively to it and when commenting
| on it indicated that it made them feel worse, that it
| negatively transformed the kind of social interactions
| they had on the platform and that it was detrimental to
| their mental health (because previously Facebook had been
| centered on 1-to-1 and many-to-1 interactions between
| peers and now was about 1-to-many interactions with an
| audience - something I guess Google tried to mitigate in
| its own social media experiment somewhat unsuccessfully
| by letting you group your "friends" into "circles").
|
| The revolutionary change that made Facebook uniquely
| successful wasn't being a social media platform, it was
| forcing its users (who were so far treating it as a way
| to keep in touch with acquaintances, old friends and
| distant family) to compete for each other's attention and
| offering corporations the opportunity to join that
| competition - all the while retaining the messaging that
| the platform is about "social" interactions between
| peers. And of course mining the everliving #### out of
| their users' data while non-consensually tracking them
| across the entire web without their knowledge.
|
| But the "attention is the currency in the marketplace of
| ideas" concept they launched pretty much defined all
| "social media" companies from that point on, which is why
| we nowadays often forget the term used to be much more
| appropriate in the past (although often constrained to a
| crowd of very technical nerds).
|
| Oh, and of course they very successfully killed much of
| the tradition of the Open Web by encouraging a walled
| garden approach even when it required them to actively
| defraud their advertisers by lying about the performance
| of video content. But I think the trophy for launching
| that extinction event belongs to Apple when they pivoted
| away from the original web-first concept for the iPhone
| to the proprietary App Store.
| mg wrote:
| Yes, but I think it makes a nice view to point to some
| first popular instance of something. Otherwise everything
| becomes fuzzy. For example, there was AI in the 60s. But
| ChatGPT was the first that achieved mass adoption.
| psychoslave wrote:
| There were printers before Gutenberg, but printing
| Chinese ideograms was a totally different challenge. Yet
| the list mention printing, not Gutenberg.
| pell wrote:
| In a grand view removed 1000 years from now the introduction
| of digital communication and their network effects must have
| been pivotal though even if it was in a negative way (which
| very well may be). I just doubt that would then be a point
| about Facebook specifically as this is just a tiny slice of
| that era, I think.
| prox wrote:
| MySpace was much earlier, as well as a few other
| forerunners
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| We are a tiny slice of history. A thousand years from now
| we may be hazily recalled as the period that slavery was
| abolished (edit: sadly enough we probably won't be) ,
| electricity and computers were invented, 3 of the world
| wars occured, and the first great population explosion and
| cultural implosion took place. Most electronic information
| will be lost so our century will be known as the electronic
| dark ages. All of this will be studied by the advanced
| artificial intelligence entities and the sentient
| cockroaches, the last surviving carbon life forms on earth.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| It's the reverse of the Cloaca Maxima, the Roman empire
| sewage system. Facebook is where unprocessed sewage is fed
| back to the people, straight into their hands.
| sixtyj wrote:
| *Straight to their heads.
| janlukacs wrote:
| Preach brother, preach! :)
| Gravityloss wrote:
| The invention of radio brought us in short order the
| Volksempfanger or the German people's receiver, and its
| consequences...
| barbazoo wrote:
| Radio is a technology. Facebook is an application of
| technology. The internet would be a better comparison which
| arguably has overwhelming positive impact.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Then surely the same complaint could be made about some
| particular radio stations.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Radio and internet have both had positive and negative
| effects. One can also say they are only neutral
| platforms, and people have then created positive and
| negative things with them. Same can be said about
| Facebook or Reddit too IMO. At what point does the
| morality start, complex question.
| standardUser wrote:
| You could say the same about fossil fuels, moreso perhaps,
| but we don't, because that would be pedantic.
| Jolter wrote:
| Well, there's no need to be pedantic about that particular
| point, because nobody put fossil fuels on the list of human
| progress.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I've seen estimates that world population would be
| billions fewer without fossil fuels.
|
| They have big costs, but also big benefits.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| I've seen estimates that the curvature of the world is
| zero. I'm not obliged to believe every estimate I read.
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| https://www.historicaltechtree.com
| mg wrote:
| This misses the overview. It has lots and lots of
| technologies all at the same size. And no way to zoom out.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| It's not ideal, but you can look at the bottom bar and get
| a sense of density of innovation over a certain time
| period.
| epaga wrote:
| I actually made something quite similar to this with a few
| friends as an app 14 years ago using Wikipedia data. We called
| it LineTime, it was a fun little project! (Wow, I even found
| our video from back then...and man, that really was a LONG time
| ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW__WZ6pxJ8)
| paulirish wrote:
| Makes me think of the Histomap, designed in 1931. It's an
| attractive design for history over a timeseries:
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...
|
| In 1942 he did one for Evolution which is closer to your pitch
| (log scale Y axis, etc):
| https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2...
| whobre wrote:
| I know it was just an example, but out of curiosity, why 1982
| for home computers? Commodore 64?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Not sure why it was listed as '82, but if it was the C64, it
| makes sense. It's the most sold personal computer ever.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
|
| Nuance around this fact would be completely lost in 100
| years, let alone 1000 from now.
| Jolter wrote:
| I'd probably put 1978, but it doesn't really make much
| difference if you say it was the TRS-80, Apple II or the
| c64. The thing happened about then.
| milst wrote:
| started something like this, but without the "zoom"
| https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/
| lawlessone wrote:
| seems very 20th and 21st century biased lol.
| zulko wrote:
| 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.
| pu_pe wrote:
| This looks pretty cool actually, nice job!
| llbbdd wrote:
| This is very very cool! I went right to the month and year of
| my birth; kind of the same vibe as finding a newspaper
| published on the day you were born but all over the world.
| Thanks for sharing!
| milst wrote:
| very cool. Made something with a similar idea, but using
| timelines instead of maps. I wonder if the two could be
| combined in some way https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/
| qq66 wrote:
| Cool project. Seems like your link to "wiki-dump-extractor" is
| broken.
| annodomini2019 wrote:
| Wow, this is actually so cool. Fantastic idea, I would LOVE
| something like this in Wikipedia. Nicely done!
| zamadatix wrote:
| Similar alternative https://www.runningreality.org/
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| m2f2 wrote:
| Tibet? Never existed?
|
| Meh.
| kykat wrote:
| For those interested:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%931951)
| yehat wrote:
| 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.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| The world didn't start in 3,000 BC, but the world since 3,000
| BC started exactly in 3,000 BC.
| cyberjill wrote:
| cool
| begueradj wrote:
| I checked only North Africa: several mistakes (even inaccuracies
| in terminology such as showing Berbers and Tuaregs as if they are
| distinct population groups)
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| 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.
| tgbugs wrote:
| 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
| djoldman wrote:
| Clearly a British concoction... United States doesn't start here
| until 1784! :)
| krb5 wrote:
| Crimea is shown Russian here. I'm questioning the data source.
| booi wrote:
| It would be great if we could get private funding to make this
| dataset opensource.
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