historical-basemaps
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aourednik
Hey thanks for the updates!
Just saw you updated the data to add pre history! Do you plan on continuing to update your data?
I'd love to partner with you in adding features and making this as up to date as possible. I get around 50 hits a day on historic borders and when love to make your data a bigger part of it!
Once again great updates. Noticed you changed the folder structure. I update my site to reflect it.
https://historicborders.app
Hi @nrgapple , thank you for your message. A very nice app indeed ! I've included a link in the Readme. Yes, I've spent some time cleaning these data lately. The folder structure will remain stable for some time now, just needed to separate GeoJSON and SVG output. Added an R script for generating SVG files.
Noteworthy: I've added a new column, called SUBJECTO, that allows coloring by colonial power, while keeping the name of a region. Still has to be implemented consistently.
Much of the data is still in bad shape. This projects does need generalists to fill the gaps (Africa, Americas, Australia), and specialist of regions and epochs to correct mistakes.
If you work on a geometry file, I'll be very glad to merge a pull request
Thats sounds great! Currently what I do for colors is use a stringToColor converter package that creates a color for a country name. I will have to test out the SUBJECTO field and see if there are some cool things I can do with it!
I am continuing to try to find people on reddit to help out on the data. This repo is a amazing and really helps conceptualize the world throughout history.
A plan I have is an editor built into my application where the user can login to github and modify the features for a year (or maybe add a year too?) and then save and publish to a pull request on your repo. It might just fill the gap to get more contributors.
The idea of an editor with github login is excellent!
In context of ancient history and prehitory, I think about adding a field PARTOF , when a region is part of a greater cultural complex, e.g. the Slavic tribes. This could also be used for more semantically significant coloring.
Also, I've seen many concerns on reddit regarding the non-rendering of fuzziness of borders prior to the modern era. This could be handled for example with a blur filter in SVG. A field BORDERPRECISIONcould be added with ordinal values 1, 2 and 3 standing for 'approximate', 'moderately precise', and 'determined by international law'. This field could then be used for setting gaussian blur intensity.
Also: this site showcases the handling of overlaps of regions of influence. Something similar could be implemented for older historical borders.