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Laconic History of the World
- Swizec 14y agoHow is Slovenia defined by "party" and the rest of ex-yugoslavia as "Yugoslavia"? This confuses me greatly.
- randomafrican 14y agoFrench ? And the other one is Government ? C'mon there are many funnier and truer word i can think of
- randomafrican 14y agoAh. Saw the title. Understood.
- asimjalis 14y agoThis is hilarious. Also it’s a bit ironic that Pakistan is represented by the word “India”.
- pg 14y agoThe funny thing is, if there was a laconic (in the original sense) history of the world, the theme would be similar.
- mahmud 14y agoMuch of the world seems to have been shaped by "war" and colonialism. Only "eponymous" label is for Hungary. The country correctly self-identifies in term-frequency ;-) Most poetic definitions: New Zealand: Maori. North Korea: Kim. Saudi Arabia: Oil. Somalia: Government .. LOL!
- randomafrican 14y agoDRC and Nigeria also have government... I guess the lack of it is important.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nord 14y agoWell, not really. The label "Hungary" does not represent Hungary but Slovakia — a neighbouring country.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- eCa 14y agoIt's funny that apart from a few regions... * Bessarabia (an old name for the region where current day Moldova is) * Moravia (an important region in Czech republic) * Transsylvania (central Romania) ...most of those with country names are actually not in the countries themselves: * Hungary in Slovakia * Iraq in Kuwait * India in Pakistan * Ethiopia in Eritrea * Albanian in Kosovo * And of course British, Frech, Portuguese, Spanish and Soviet all over the place. Also interesting is Sweden, though our history certainly was defined by war we are only two years away from reaching 200 years of no war.
- michaelt 14y agoGiven that for Ireland the word is 'Northern' (as in 'Northern Ireland') I assume the person who made the map excluded the country's name.
- robin_reala 14y ago‘No war’ for Sweden is only defined in terms of not declaring war on another country; Sweden has still sent soldiers to Congo, Afghanistan and Libya to take part in military action in more recent times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_wars
- hkj 14y agoThere is a big difference between being at war and sending peace keeping troops. Defining the use of military in an area to prevent further violence and war as being at war is very wrong.
- marcosdumay 14y agoSeems that Brazil was not shaped by "war", but by "military". I'd say it's right on the mark.
- atsaloli 14y agoAustralia: New
- Zecc 14y agoThe author has stated[1] that the names of the countries were excluded for consideration in the choice of most frequent word. @atsaloti "New" really should have been excluded as the most frequent word. It appears a lot in the names of New Guinea, New South Wales, New Holland... It would be interesting to know what word came afterwards in frequency. [1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/omnitarian/8288065763/sizes/o/in/photostream/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/omnitarian/8288065763/sizes/o/i...
- adaml_623 14y agoI think this map highlights some fundamental flaw with wikipedia or what we highlight in history or something similar to this. Or possibly it's a perfect example of what is wrong with summarising a complicated entity. I hope in the future that people will move away from the Top Ten things about X or the 5 things you need to know about Y. This map is ignorance presenting as a summary. (Yes I know it's meant to be a cute map)
- arnsholt 14y agoIt'd probably be better if it used a better measure than raw term frequency in the articles. For example, most of Europe is "War". If it used something like inverse document frequency (tf-idf) to rank the terms, it might get more distinct words for each country.
- adaml_623 14y agoThat sounds like a great idea. I hope the original poster picks up on your idea. Although that may still leave some of the offensive terms listed elsewhere in the comments (Kuwait <- Iraq, Ethiopia <- Eritrea)
- tinco 14y agoThat might be so if your goal is to hilight what sets the countries apart. The author of the map chose for 'history of __' as the topic. And when doing that with countries it is not surprising to find that countries are defined by war, nobility, imperialism and rivalry. We like to think countries are formed because of their people, and their culture, but in reality countries are formed because of their resources, defendability and their interested parties. If there is one thing that defines borders in europe, it is war, and this map shows that quite laconically :)
- keithpeter 14y agoI was hoping for more words when you zoomed, like a hierarchical wordle, but I realise that that was not the purpose of the map. Interesting way to get students thinking about history.
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- merhawiew 14y agoThis is offensive. The entry for Eritrea labels it Ethiopia, the country that has attempted to occupy it for centuries.
- rickyconnolly 14y agoDitto for Kuwait's label of 'Iraq'
- EliRivers 14y agoThe entry for Eritrea shows that the word "Ethiopia" comes up a lot in the wikipedia article "History of Eritrea". Given the history of the two countries, that's to be expected. What exactly are you taking offence at?
- adnam 14y agoRead the explanation at the bottom http://hugepic.io/d2012641f/4.00/9.75/104.24 http://hugepic.io/d2012641f/4.00/9.75/104.24
- pliny 14y agoThe entry for Lebanon is Syria and many European colonies are labeled the identity of their former masters.
- Hawkee 14y agoI noticed Taiwan is labeled with China which I think many Taiwanese would take offense to. China would certainly be happy with this label though.
- hakaaak 14y agoI would bet that if you did this same things with many history books, similar words would come up, but I do not think that it is a fair summary. It would be more interesting to see the most searched Google queries coming from these countries (assuming that many use Google). Finland is Ilta Sanomat (The Evening News), for example: http://www.google.com/zeitgeist/2012/#the-world http://www.google.com/zeitgeist/2012/#the-world Unfortunately, Antarctica is not represented in Google Zeitgeist, nor are many others, but perhaps you could contact Google for that data.
- gambiting 14y agoperhaps you could contact google you could contact google could contact google contact google I don't think anyone has ever found a way to do it, other than through a court order or by applying for a job.
- notatoad 14y agoSpend enough on Adwords or google appss and you get a dedicated rep. Buy a nexus and you get a 24/7 phone number. Post something about google virtually anywhere on the Internet and Matt Cutts will probably reply to it. Stop spreading this nonsense meme.
- avar 14y agoHere's a writeup by the author about it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/omnitarian/8288065763/sizes/o/in/photostream/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/omnitarian/8288065763/sizes/o/i...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kushsolitary 14y agoIt flooded my browser history with 1000+ entries.
- carlisle_ 14y agoIt seems like when you scroll or zoom the browser URL is rewritten. The URL corresponds with the current view of the image. Decent idea, terrible implementation.
- kybernetyk 14y agoMaybe this should be called 'Humanity represented by a few words'?
- abhinavk 14y agoIt's quite ironic that Pakistan is represented by the word 'India'.
- manojlds 14y agoHow? India and Pakistan were the same country till 1947.
- alan_cx 14y agoWorth a look at the home page. Many fascinating images and maps there.
- parsa28 14y agoEmpire!
- domador 14y agoIt's interesting how Nicaragua is "defined" by a family name (Somoza). Other family names I see include Kim for North Korea and Khaan for Mongolia. They're all analogous to Dynasty for China.
- morsch 14y agoI'd love to see the results for other text queries. E.g. use the cuisine of X range of articles as a source. Maybe filter the results to only include actual foodstuffs. The typography is completely custom, though, so there's no way to automate the process.
- ikassinopoulos 14y agoNo Cyprus :)?
- vladstudio 14y agoI can't help but mention my own typographic world map - http://www.vladstudio.com/wallpaper/?typographic_world_map http://www.vladstudio.com/wallpaper/?typographic_world_map
- gambiting 14y agoIt is pretty cool, but seriously, do I really need a $9.99 account to download a single wallpaper? That's not cool.
- vladstudio 14y agoThat's what many people say - but on the other way, that's how I make my living! And surprisingly, it works (it's not $9.99 per wallpaper, as you might think - it's for entire account, unlocking everything I have to offer).
- gambiting 14y agoYes I thought you might say that. But I personally feel like this is a psychological issue - I am quite unwilling to pay 9.99 for an account, to get access to all the stuff you make(no offense, I think your art is great). I like this wallpaper, I want it now,and I would be more than happy to pay a single-time fee for it - 1.99,2.99 or even 4.99 - that would be psychologically easier to stomach than getting an entire account made,which I don't want or need.
- drbig 14y agoA truly good summary of our planetary civilisation to date. Thankfully we can shape the future to look different.
- lysol 14y agoI don't think this always works so well. The word for Egypt is 'Period'. The design, however, is great.
- mtts 14y agoThat would be because it has a long, long history that's traditionally divided into many periods. So it makes sense :-)
- arbuge 14y agoEh... I'm from Malta. Representative or not, I'm thinking "a" or "I" might be the only words which fit there... Reminds me of a department manager who insisted everybody place a push pin on a world map he hung up in the office, to show where everybody was originally from. I obliterated my own country in so doing. After that most people assumed I was born on a cruise ship or something...
- keithpeter 14y agoNice place though. I live on an island as well, but you'd think we ran half the planet the way the government go on (UK).
- brazzy 14y agoTo be fair, you did run half the planet not too long ago...
- CWIZO 14y agoDon't be fooled. Slovenia is most certainly not one huge party.
- g3orge 14y agowar in Spain? why?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- d--b 14y agoHave you ever heard of the Spanish Civil War? It was kind of important. General Franco? Fascism? Does that ring a bell?
- ponyous 14y agoOhhh, there is party in Slovenia.
- yo-devil 14y agoNepal is no longer a kingdom.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mtts 14y agoAs confronting as it is, most of these seem to me spot on. Most of European history is indeed about war. Most of the African and Asian history that is written about is indeed about who colonized what. It's a great map: it provides an easily digestible visualization of the limitations of history writing.
- yeahyeahyeah 14y agoThis would be an amazing demonstration of cultural relativism. You used the "en.wikipedia.org" site for the source. Good. Now put a loop around the whole thing, and after you're done making the English-"history-of ____" map (which you have just done), repeat with the French - "history of___ map", and so forth for every language that has entries (some may be blank for some countries). Next, you can take your 40-80 or whatever maps (whichever languages you decided to complete this for), and translate them via automated translation into English. So, we get "the different language Wikipedia's different views of the world", with English (untranslated) being only the first source, and additional sources both native and translated directly into English. For example, while for Russia, "soviet" won out from the English-language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia going from http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8 http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%... (by clicking "Russian" on the interwiki link on the left) I would be interested in what the most common word is on THAT page :). This would be an awesome example of cultural relativism.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoJust did that. The most common word with a meaning seems to be СССР (USSR) the next one (barring country name) is война (war). No surprises here. In case of Russian language doing it properly is noticeably harder because Russian is an inflected language.
- joelberman 14y agoThe comments seem to prove why the map is useful. What would you like your countries word to be? Work to that end. Or find a word you like and emigrate.
- joejohnson 14y agoSo, war is one of the most common words on most countries wikipedia pages. Illuminating.
- robomartin 14y agoI was puzzled by this, particularly by the number of countries that were marked with "war". So, I did what any programmer might do, I wrote some code to check it out. Here it is: https://gist.github.com/4416107 https://gist.github.com/4416107 I just threw it together quickly. It's got some warts (not the best code for grabbing data from Wikipedia). Of course, feel free to do with it as you wish. I only sampled a couple dozen countries or so. It seems that the author of the graphic decided to take a little license here and there rather than making strict use of the word with the most usage. For example, if I didn't screw-up the code, in Canada the most frequent words are: [ 143] books [ 118] canadian [ 95] british [ 82] war However, the author decided to use "british". In Argentina: [ 53] president [ 50] argentine [ 47] war [ 46] military Yet he used "war" Brazil: [ 28] military [ 22] portuguese [ 19] portugal [ 16] first [ 15] war The choice was "military" Saudi Arabia: [ 114] saudi [ 76] arabia [ 37] king [ 31] oil [ 28] arab Chosen: "oil" I am not passing judgement at all, just pointing out what I learned from a very limited test. At some level It would be interesting to see data for all countries. At the same time, a better metric than single-page word frequency would probably be more interesting than this. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf
- 6ren 14y ago"books" appears 3 times on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canada
- robomartin 14y agoAh, yes. I didn't do a full cleanup job before processing and you caught one of those words. If you open that page with Chrome and do a "View Source" you'll see that "books" actually appears 597 times in a whole pile of links on the page. Some of them got through. If you only search what a human can see, yeah, it's somewhere in the order of 3 to 5 times. I might have a look at the code and see why the full <a> tag contents are not being removed. Funny enough, that's the only bit of code I did not write. I got lazy and grabbed something right out of the PHP manual pages. Lesson learned.
- Zircom 14y agoAny chance of getting this on a poster or something? Would look cool on a wall.