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OpenHistoricalMap
- julienreszka 5y agoWhy does this start at 1800?
- sellyme 5y agoIt doesn't. That's an input field, you can edit it and go back to -4000.
- julienreszka 5y agoYou are correct, The UI doesn't show it very clearly tho.
- omgtehlion 5y agoWell, currently the data really starts at 1800 though. For earlier dates data is filled very sparingly, that’s why, I suppose, it defaults to 1800.
- timeon 5y agoAlso 1800s has good coverage of sources. Like this one in Europe: https://maps.arcanum.com/en/ https://maps.arcanum.com/en/ (actually this one is probably licensed - but some of those maps have public domain version).
- matesz 5y agoSwitzerland didn't change it's boarders since 1800. Is this the main reason why they are the richest (or one of the richest) countries?
- h4kor 5y agoBeing able to easily defend your territory and not participating in wars probably helps to build and maintain capital
- algo_cheese 5y agoAround 1800 Switzerland was invaded by French armies so it's not really true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_in_the_Napoleonic_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland_in_the_Napoleonic_...
- eCa 5y agoYes, but that is almost a quarter of a millennium ago.
- julienreszka 5y agoNo I don't think so. Counterexample: Germany changed its borders all the time, still powerful and wealthy tho.
- Mordisquitos 5y agoPlus another counterexample from the opposite side: Andorra hasn't changed its borders since 1278, but only became reasonably rich in the second half of the 20th century.
- Glavnokoman 5y agoIt is like 3 times less wealthy per capita compared to Switzerland. So this is rather a co-example.
- 5y ago
- hyperhopper 5y agoIs anybody else getting changing data when zooming in and out? This might be a mobile issue but there are definitely some problems there.
- SahAssar 5y agoIt should be possible to import in some data using the wikidata "inception" [1] and "OpenStreetMap relation ID" [2] statements. [1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P571 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P571 [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P402 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P402
- openhistmap 5y agoI would love that, but I'm not sure what GIS format data that would yield. Any thoughts?
- SahAssar 5y agoThat's why I mentioned the OpenStreetMap relation ID, with that you should be able to pull the OSM data and there are usually tools to convert OSM data to whatever you need. What format do you need it in?
- adflux 5y agoThis is really cool
- accurrent 5y agoWhelps someone has labelled China as belonging to Goguryeo (Korea) at around 464AD...Unfortunately I have to sign in to edit the map...
- openhistmap 5y agoTell us more - is having to sign in to edit a barrier? Should we rethink that? (also, I've made a note to fix that... I believe that was from an old ThinkQuest dataset. TY!)
- mesbahamin 5y agoThere are some fun things to be found near modern day Seattle, WA.
- tut-urut-utut 5y agoThe idea is nice, but so many inaccuracies. For the default period of 1800 to 2021 more than half of the European countries are missing.
- brylie 5y agoOpenStreetMap is community maintained so will tend to change and improve with contribution of time: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Historical_Map/OHM_Basics https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Historical_Map/OHM_...
- openhistmap 5y agoYep - we've just started getting some traction. I would expect that we'll have Europe from 1800-2021 done within a few months. Perhaps you would like to join in? Separately, missing data is different from inaccurate data, no? I'm sure we have many inaccuracies, as well, but we're working to fix those.
- eb0la 5y agoVery cool idea. I remember borrowing Kinder & Hermann books when I was in high school. They were awesome (you can see them in the Internet Archive https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Kinder%2C+Hermann%2C+1920-1968%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Kinder%2C+... ). Worth taking a look at it _in_paper_ ;-)
- NKosmatos 5y agoNice initiative but sure it will cause many many user conflicts, especially for locations where the boundaries are disputed. I hope we don't see comment wars here in HN about different regions.
- mdiesel 5y agoBorders are still disputed today, so any issues that are relevant would also exist in the OSM maps. I'd heard that Google shows differing borders depending on where you're viewing from, not sure if OSM do the same. Of course there are plenty of borders in history that are always going to be debated. Those are academic disputes though.
- Un1corn 5y agoOSM is showing what's on the ground so there are no dotted lines like with Google Maps. For example both the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem will be shown as part of Israel because it is the de facto ruler of those areas.
- publicola1990 5y agoIs this an open project where people can contribute to? There isn't much text on the page describing their approach.
- PaulArchivist 5y agoYes it is and yes you can! There is more information here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Historical_Map https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Historical_Map
- Dig1t 5y agoWell this is a super awesome project! Can we talk about why the oceans are that sickly, Windows 95, color of green? It’s kind of offputting..
- openhistmap 5y agoHey, dev is ongoing! What hex shade should it be? I agree, it needs to be better!!
- dddw 5y agoBeing Dutch and a history-buff, I have one mayor gripe with historical maps, that sees land as 'moving lines' on a fixed map. When I look at a historical maps (also in books), I often see the Netherlands represented in it's current form, i.e. containing land that is not even 50 years old, being prestent hundreds or even thousands of years. I get that it is an intricate history, and maybe too much effort in some cases, but please at least remove flevoland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tda 5y agoIt seems like this is adding some vectors on a gridded base map. But OSM has every object in a vector form, also coastlines etc. So I don't think there is a technical reason why coastlines would have to be fixed for a historical map. On the timescale of ages and millennia, rivers in delta planes are also usually not very static.
- rob74 5y agoNot only deltas, any river meandering over any plain will change its course pretty "quickly" (which creates problems if such a river is defined as the border between two countries BTW)
- openhistmap 5y agoWell... coastlines are handled in a deep, dark, arcane part of OSM planet and data processing, but you're right. Rivers, on the other hand should be straightforward to change. We'll have some cleaned up examples in the near future.
- globular-toast 5y agoI live in the Fens in England and noticed the same thing. You can set it back 1000 years and not only is the Fens still drained, there are artificial drainage channels that weren't dug out for another 600 years. It seems an assumption has been made that rivers and coastlines don't change over time but it's so far from true! For me it's one of the most interesting, and scary, things when looking at old maps. Does the data model support changing natural features like rivers and coastlines?
- imrejonk 5y agoCool project! Too bad there's not much detail in these maps. The Dutch land registry and national mapping agency maintains a website with highly detailed, historical maps of the Netherlands that go back to 1815: https://topotijdreis.nl/ https://topotijdreis.nl/
- openhistmap 5y ago:) We've gotta start somewhere! ;) Please join in & help out!
- MaXtreeM 5y agoI am quite bad at history but quickly looking at central Europe this project seems to have some inaccuracies. - I couldn't find any mention of Prussia [0] - during years 1920-1938 the borders between Czechoslovakia and Poland are messing so it looks like it is a single country I am sure anyone can find what is missing/wrong with the history of their country. This is a community project after all so I am not surprised but based on Wayback machine this project started at least 7 years ago. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia
- nivenkos 5y agoHuh? I opened it and immediately in the centre was "Königreich Preußen"
- MaXtreeM 5y agoI am sorry, I managed to find it but for some reason it dissapears after year 1818!
- notahacker 5y agoPortugal - one of the oldest countries in the world - inexplicably not appearing until 1929 is one of the most jarring things
- r34 5y agoI'm not an expert in history, but I think that Poland should reappear in 1918, but it's missing few more years on the map.
- PaulArchivist 5y agoIt tends more to be things which haven't been mapped yet rather than inaccuracies as such. Most mappers have concentrated on mapping their local town or city rather than national borders. See Kiev (https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/#map=16/50.4633/30.5218&layers=O&date=1932&daterange=1853,2020 https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/#map=16/50.4633/30.5218&la...) and London (https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/#map=15/51.5163/-0.0900&layers=O&date=1890&daterange=1800,2021 https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/#map=15/51.5163/-0.0900&la...) for example. While the project may have been going a while, it was only last year that the time slider was introduced which made it properly functional as a historical map. At the moment there are still few mappers (including myself) but I get the impression that OHM is now beginning to develop more quickly!
- tda 5y agoIf this gets enough traction this could make historical maps so much more accessible. Instead of every historian writing their own magnum opus of a particular area and timespan, all the geographical information can be combined in a single system. Is there a system built in for keeping track of annotations/sources? How are debated topics/unresolved locations dealt with? What if different schools of thought exist for where something was in the past, could multiple hypothesized locations exist for a single object? Direct link with Wikipedia would also be useful Very nice project, hope it becomes as useful and detailed as the present day OSM
- jobigoud 5y agoThe present-day map must have a system to deal with territorial disputes, maybe a similar system can be used.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoThe current system from e.g. Google is pretty weak IMO, it's made to not piss the sides off, so if you load up Google Maps in Pakistan you see the disputed territories belonging to Pakistan, and in India you see them belonging to India. But if it's the stuff of history it would be interesting to display the areas overlapping each other, or to mark that there was active conflict over the territory at that point in time.
- ketzu 5y ago> The current system from e.g. Google is pretty weak IMO, it's made to not piss the sides off, It is mostly respecting local regulation on the topic. If you are in a country that does not regulate the area you see the disputed areas marked.
- thedudeabides5 5y agoJust wait till the flame wars on Taiwan and the Nine Dash Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line
- rntksi 5y agoImmediately thought of Europa Universalis IV and all its expansions :-) However so much potential for abuse and misuses .. just think of all the border disputes currently countries are having and multiply those by all the years
- rob74 5y agoCool project! Hope they get a lot of contributors - they are definitely going to need them, already in the default view I can see a lot of room for improvement: in most of Romania they still have the Roman/Greek names in 1850, Serbia is shown as "Servia" (as it was apparently called by the Romans?!) etc.
- maze-le 5y agoThis is also a great resource for a project like this: https://www.oldmapsonline.org/ https://www.oldmapsonline.org/ These are mainly links to georeferenced raster images and databases, not vectors / OSM data. But, still -- I've already spent hours browsing old maps of my home city. For anyone interested in contributing to this project, oldmapsonline might be a great reference.
- HighChaparral 5y agoFor the UK, the National Library of Scotland’s historical maps are a fantastic resource: https://maps.nls.uk/ https://maps.nls.uk/ Ireland’s Ordnance Survey also has some good historical resources: https://www.osi.ie/products/professional-mapping/historical-mapping/ https://www.osi.ie/products/professional-mapping/historical-...
- larusso 5y agoThis is cool. For my hometown Berlin I love to browse this map https://1928.tagesspiegel.de/ https://1928.tagesspiegel.de/ it shows Berlin in 1928 and most areas are still the same.
- maze-le 5y agoYeah, it's very intersting indeed. Roads and street layouts usually don't change that much over the centuries -- they get integrated and amended, but seldom disappear. I was pretty amazed to recognize the street layout of Leipzig in the 1740ies: https://biblio.unibe.ch/web-apps/maps/zoomify.php?pic=Ryh_5310_12.jpg&col=ryh https://biblio.unibe.ch/web-apps/maps/zoomify.php?pic=Ryh_53...
- Seb-C 5y agoI hope this gets more contributors, as it could be quite useful. I wonder how difficult it would be to build some kind of `OpenHistoricalStreetView`. We certainly have enough historical photos to do something interesting.
- pomian 5y agoWe could add paintings too. Many were very accurate "street views".
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoMy favourite historical map resource on the internet is the National Library of Scotland's georeferenced side-by-side viewer: https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=5&lat=56.00000&lon=-4.00000&layers=1&right=ESRIWorld https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=5&lat=56.... View a variety of historical maps on the left, with the same area "now" on the right, with the pointer synced between the two sides so that you can trace roads, building outlines, etc.
- scoot 5y agoNeat! On zooming in on the UK, I landed mostly by chance on Gatwick Airport, only to discover that it's built on the site of a former racecourse. A quick web search brought me to the Wikipedia page with a potted history of said racecourse, and how Gatwick has named various features after it. Fascinating. Also, don't miss the swipe view...
- larusso 5y agoWhy do I have the urge to tap the satellite view button. Common you game developers from Flight Simulator. Given some references one could fake this really nice :) But joke aside. I think this is awesome. Does anyone know how accurate the borders are in the German area when changing years?
- vanous 5y agoI have a relative who has been spending years collecting data from archives and building historical maps of Ostrava, a city in Czech republic [1]. He built nine (9) time based layers (1860-1940). The amount of time and work this takes is just incredible. He has been considering providing data to OHM, but obviously has not been convinced by this prospect yet, one of the reasons has been loss of control over his data, as there are academic institutions ready to snap this a put their name on it. It was already attempted. I can imagine there are more researchers like this and the results of their work, all the data, is fragmented somewhere out there... and possibly lost. 1: http://www.mapomol.cz http://www.mapomol.cz
- contingencies 5y agoI have seen many issues with historical maps on Wikipedia, one of the worst offenders is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Territories_of_Dynasties_in_China.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Territories_of_Dynas... which is basically propaganda. We desperately need a new one with citations. I would suggest that, if various portions the vectors could cite evidence, it would be an excellent basis for historic vector maps on Wikipedia. Currently, this whole area is a shambles. Further, I recently learned some historical maps I had created with great effort for my Tang Dynasty text translation at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Manshu were deleted by some Wikipedia policy-thumber who reckoned including low resolution satellite backgrounds to contextual maps was grounds for erasing them. You'd think being an open source project for academic caliber translations you'd be able to use, you know, open sources under academic fair use. My tolerance for idiots is truly at an all time low.
- deepstack 5y ago>I have seen many issues with historical maps on Wikipedia, one of the worst offenders is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Territories_of_Dynas https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Territories_of_Dynas... which is basically propaganda. We desperately need a new one with citations. can you explain a bit more about that? Not too familiar with the background of Chinese map.
- contingencies 5y agoThe notion that there is a fixed line between cultures is itself a farce, but, historically the majority of such maps drawn for empires are written using the implied borders from latter-day interpretations of geography that was mentioned by an eventual victor as annexed. However, the reality on the ground is usually much different. In some cases, thousands of years different.
- ferdowsi 5y agoThis is a difficult thing to describe for any pre-modern polity, where vassalage and weak frontiers make it difficult to describe if a central power actually controlled a territory. The Ottoman Empire de-facto exercised little control its North African vassals, the Roman Empire had increasingly weak control over its frontiers due to migrations and incursions, etc.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoThere are a few nice timelapses on youtube of borders of Europe changing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-2zaOhYlAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-2zaOhYlAM Fascinating stuff. There were some attempts with e.g. Yahoo's Geoplanet to take historical context into account. I know some people who are still working on that data set (which Yahoo released under a creative commons license): https://spelunker.whosonfirst.org/concordances/woe/ https://spelunker.whosonfirst.org/concordances/woe/ I live near a building in Berlin that has a sign "this building used to be in a different country". Also, I live on the only street still intersected by the wall. It's Bergstrasse which is intersected by the wall memorial. I remember listening to the news announcements in the Netherlands when the wall fell when I was a teenager. Another interesting thing is that borders are kind of imprecise. We've only had GPS for a few decades and most maps predate the existence of that. Land surveillance to modern standards pretty much developed only in the last 200 years (e.g. Ordnance Survey in the UK is one of the older examples of an institute specializing in that). Post colonial dividing up of territory in e.g. Africa was done with rulers without too much regard for history, culture, or ethnical divisions. The border between the US and Canada is similar in some places. Also internal borders for some federal states are funny like that. Besides, stuff moves around on this planet by centimeters per year in some areas. The meridian does not actually run through the little monument they have in Greenwhich for that (by over 100m). It hasn't for a long time. Rivers, which are commonly used for borders, move as well. There are some minor border disputes all over Europe (and a few major ones) as well as occasional pragmatic agreements between e.g. Belgium and the Netherlands on how to administer certain regions. Baarle Nassau of cause being the most surreal example where we are talking exclaves, enclaves and enclaves containing enclaves, etc. Some houses cross borders and have entrances/exits in different countries. It's completely nuts.
- openhistmap 5y agoWe LOVE those youtube timelines. Unfortunately, you can't zoom in & you cannot hit pause or easily scrub back and forth. We're also big fans of WhosOnFirst!
- aembleton 5y agoLooks like they've added a start date and end date field to existing features of OSM. Couldn't this just be fed back into the existing OSM database? We could add dates when pubs opened. Then when they shut we can add their closing dates; adding to the historical record and they could then be removed from the OSM map.
- akavel 5y agoAwesome idea! I was thinking about something like this too for a long time, though it's currently in a mental box labeled "probably not in this life" for me. As others in this thread mentioned, there are quite a few interesting challenges that would probably need some experiments how to resolve in the future, though I totally do think "starting small" from a somewhat simplified prototype, and then hopefully iterating, is most certainly the only possible way to do this. Summarizing/expanding on some challenges I've seen noted by others in this discussion, and adding "a few" of mine that I randomly pondered sometimes (while not even being a history buff): • although (IIRC according to something I've read recently) land surveying was practised in established "countries" since at least babylonian times, I believe there's quite a few challenges to the notion of "firm and precise borders"; going kinda back in time, this can include: - access to precise survey data might not be easy even in modern day, with this getting harder and harder + lines more and more blurry the further we go into the past; - as noted by others, some borders and territory ownership is heavily disputed even in the modern day; - during wars, this gets even more unclear kinda by definition (a lot of "we control this territory" can change as frequently as many times a day, and is anyway often vaguely somewhere on a spectrum between "fact" and "wishful thinking"); [as a side note, I was kinda thinking it would be even more awesomesauce to show army movements and other population data on such a historical map as well, however this adds a whole new universe of complexity]; - a notable subcase of the above points being "deep state" situations, where the official country's officials might have a varying (sometimes tiny or none at all) authority over some parts of their territory, controlled e.g. by organised crime; - in less "organised" countries (incl. more "primitive/aboriginal" ones), I suspect land survey might sometimes not exist at all; and/or, it may be based on some rather different cultural notions of "ownership" and "borders"; - in fact, AFAIU, the notion of "countries" is kinda something that is not a given at all historically; I believe throughout history something resembling a feudal model (or a kingdom) is much more prevalent, i.e. "I [a king] claim to be owner of this land", where I would imagine it's much too easy to make such claims; and then, with all what I wrote above, even looking at "de facto" ownership and fairly "organised" kingdoms, based on just some pop-historical literature I believe especially the closer you got to a "border" between the kingdoms, the more it resembled permanent "war territory", with "quick border raids" etc. and local skirmishes being so obvious, that nobody could even imagine it might look different in the 20th+ century (with things like The Chinese Wall and Hadrian's Wall being kinda monuments to that reality); for another possibly nonobvious organisation model from modern point of view, see ancient Greek city-states; • time tracking being very different (e.g. "king X's Nth year of rule") and sometimes tricky to map to a universal timeline, such as the "AD/BC" (a.k.a. "CE/BCE") scheme (e.g. can we pinpoint the start of "king X"'s rule based on available sources? was it even a real king or is it purely a mythical figure? do all the sources claim the same X and N?); • as others wrote, natural land borders & shapes definitely moved & changed over time; this can include but is not limited to: - rivers (see other comments); artificial islands; volcano islands; volcano "mountains"; dams; floods (incl. permanent floods into land-locked depressions); drying lakes/seas (see e.g. Dead Sea, Caspian Sea); - ice, incl. the "ice ages"; maybe a stretch case, but IIRC the Baltic Sea is known to have frozen in historical times, to the extent that inn(s) for travelers crossing it over the ice were built on that surface [though "citation needed", i.e. I totally did not fact-check it]; - go far enough in time, and continental drift itself becomes clearly apparent; this means not just broken landmass continuity or new landmass connections, but also new mountains (which often tend to become natural borders). And that's just off the top of my head ;D I think stuff like this makes such a project super interesting and novel! :)
- rendall 5y agoFinland became independent from Russia in 1917. This map has it at 1943.
- mik09 5y agonot very related but i think our technology is at the brink of some actual psychohistory
- breck 5y agoLove the idea. Just made a note to self to try and add cape cod canal data, as I just checked and it has the canal there far before it actually was dug.
- nickik 5y agoOh wow. I am literally slowly working on something like this as well. But my knowledge of mapping technology is very limited. My focus was actually much more on trying to use partly public data, and partly contributed data in order to 'render' information on top of such a map. My vision was basically to have all historically known people and there locations being visible on the map. Wikidata already has a nice start to this, but you would need a contributor model to flesh this idea out quite a bit more. Another step after that would be the movement of armies. This could be really interesting if you could see armies moving around at different times and getting closer to each other, or pass each other by. City population is another interesting thing. There is no easy way today to get a good estimate of what some city X population might have been at any particular period. That information is buried in all all over the place. There are many more ideas, but having his historical map is actually awesome for me, because that was the part that I know least about. So it should be an amazing piece of the puzzle. I will defiantly try to contribute to effort.
- hahamaster 5y agoThey published it waay too early. The quality is abysmal.
- howolduis 5y ago+1 i dont know why they published this when u cant even see the US in 2020
- timeon 5y agoProbably, like openstreetmap.org, the page may be intended mostly for editors.
- openhistmap 5y agoIf we didn't publish it, how would we attract helpers?
- howolduis 5y agobruh, 90% of the countries aren't there when I toggle 2020, what kind of scam is this?
- artur_makly 5y agoThis reminds me of the nascent stages of a very similar project I designed a few years ago[0], that sadly never was able to get traction (unrelated to the concept) ..but the idea at the time had a lot of vision and potential. Glad to see it reinvigorated especially in the age of misinformation and white-washed historical data. If the UI/UX, social-graph, and collab features evolve to a much more polished level, this could really attract a new generation of younger researchers who would really be able to scale it up. Here is a sample UI/UX [1] of what a well designed timeline could potentially look like. [0] https://www.design2dev.com/work/mosaic/ https://www.design2dev.com/work/mosaic/ [1] https://www.design2dev.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/timeline-demo.png https://www.design2dev.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/timeli...
- zucked 5y agoCurrent-day Door County, Wisconsin has existed since well before this map begins, but shows as Lake Michigan. So, there's that.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoNeat! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Deseret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Deseret
- devill285 5y agoI will recommend to chceck https://www.oldmapsonline.org https://www.oldmapsonline.org
- cbm-vic-20 5y agoOh, nice. Setting the date to 1800 and looking at Boston shows the "pre-fill" coastline, and even the fort at Boston Neck. No roads, though, and Logan Airport's land wasn't filled in in 1825, but it is editable.