About

A little project to help visualize contemporaneous events in history.

The map shows two types of data:

• "On this day" events, obtained from the Wikimedia onthisday Feed API. See the code for this on GitHub (ayaankazerouni/map-history).
• Historical borders, collected and made available by André Ourednik (aourednik/historical-basemaps).

Ourednik emphasises:

When using the data, keep in mind that

• historical boundaries are even more disputed than contemporary ones, that
• the actual concept of territory and national boundary becomes meaningful, in Europe, only since the Peace of Westphalia (1648), that
• areas of civilizations actually overlap, especially in ancient history, and that
• overlaying these ancient vector maps on contemporary physical maps can be misleading; rivers, lakes, shorelines do change very much over millennia; think for instance about the evolution of the Aral Sea since the 1980s.

TO-DOs

This is a work in progress.

• Add fuzziness for uncertain borders.
• Refactor event data.
  • Events don't only occur on single days or in single places. So the longer term plan is to have an event database that allows GeoJSON features with start and end dates. Then we can draw events with larger spatial and temporal spans.
  • So the idea is: if someone searches for the an event that's not necessarily on one day, or in one place, like "the Rennaissance". We can search for other events that overlapped with the Rennaissance temporally, and show those events on the map as well. Those events might be regions or points, and might span single days or longer time periods.
• Explore the Human History Wikipedia page.