
Laconic History of the World - mparramon
http://hugepic.io/d2012641f/3.00/57.89/9.67
======
adaml_623
I 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
It'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.

~~~
tinco
That 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 :)

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yeahyeahyeah
This 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>

going from
[http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%...](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)
(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
Just 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.

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arbuge
Eh... 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
Nice 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
To be fair, you _did_ run half the planet not too long ago...

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robomartin
I 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>

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>

~~~
6ren
"books" appears 3 times on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canada>

~~~
robomartin
Ah, 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.

~~~
dredmorbius
Using a text-mode browser to render HTML to text, strip off headers, and avoid
summarizing links (lynx works great for this) might be a fast route to cleaner
results.

You'd probably also want to exclude the "See also" and "References" sections.

For Canada, not excluding stopwords ("the", "of", "and", etc.) or the country
name itself, I get:

    
    
         1      869 the
         2      449 of
         3      326 and
         4      288 in
         5      214 to
         6      142 a
         7      135 canada
         8      106 was
         9       87 by
        10       72 as
        11       71 british
        12       70 with
        13       69 s
        14       62 war
        15       61 on
        16       53 canadian
        17       52 from
        18       49 for
        19       44 were
        20       42 new
    

Which still puts "british" on top.

~~~
robomartin
Yup, in case you missed it, I posted updated code that really cleans-up the
scraped page data very well. With the new code "british" is on top of the
Canada list. It was a fun little exercise. There are some issues accessing
Wikipedia this way but no big deal for a quick little test.

------
avar
Here's a writeup by the author about it:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/omnitarian/8288065763/sizes/o/i...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/omnitarian/8288065763/sizes/o/in/photostream/)

------
pg
The funny thing is, if there was a laconic (in the original sense) history of
the world, the theme would be similar.

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domador
It'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.

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mahmud
Much 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!

~~~
eCa
It'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.

~~~
robin_reala
‘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>

~~~
hkj
There 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.

------
vladstudio
I can't help but mention my own typographic world map -
<http://www.vladstudio.com/wallpaper/?typographic_world_map>

~~~
gambiting
It is pretty cool, but seriously, do I really need a $9.99 account to download
a single wallpaper? That's not cool.

~~~
vladstudio
That'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
Yes 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.

------
morsch
I'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.

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hakaaak
I 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>

Unfortunately, Antarctica is not represented in Google Zeitgeist, nor are many
others, but perhaps you could contact Google for that data.

~~~
gambiting
perhaps 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
Spend 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.

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mtts
As 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.

------
CWIZO
Don't be fooled. Slovenia is most certainly not one huge party.

------
joelberman
The 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.

------
kushsolitary
It flooded my browser history with 1000+ entries.

~~~
carlisle_
It 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.

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asimjalis
This is hilarious. Also it’s a bit ironic that Pakistan is represented by the
word “India”.

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ponyous
Ohhh, there is party in Slovenia.

------
abhinavk
It's quite ironic that Pakistan is represented by the word 'India'.

~~~
manojlds
How? India and Pakistan were the same country till 1947.

------
drbig
A truly good summary of our planetary civilisation to date. Thankfully we can
shape the future to look different.

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lysol
I don't think this always works so well. The word for Egypt is 'Period'. The
design, however, is great.

~~~
mtts
That would be because it has a long, long history that's traditionally divided
into many periods.

So it makes sense :-)

------
joejohnson
So, war is one of the most common words on most countries wikipedia pages.
Illuminating.

------
Swizec
How is Slovenia defined by "party" and the rest of ex-yugoslavia as
"Yugoslavia"?

This confuses me greatly.

------
randomafrican
French ? And the other one is Government ?

C'mon there are many funnier and truer word i can think of

~~~
randomafrican
Ah. Saw the title. Understood.

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Zircom
Any chance of getting this on a poster or something? Would look cool on a
wall.

------
alan_cx
Worth a look at the home page. Many fascinating images and maps there.

------
kybernetyk
Maybe this should be called 'Humanity represented by a few words'?

------
ikassinopoulos
No Cyprus :)?

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parsa28
Empire!

------
yo-devil
Nepal is no longer a kingdom.

------
g3orge
war in Spain? why?

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merhawiew
This is offensive. The entry for Eritrea labels it Ethiopia, the country that
has attempted to occupy it for centuries.

~~~
Hawkee
I noticed Taiwan is labeled with China which I think many Taiwanese would take
offense to. China would certainly be happy with this label though.

~~~
jrajav
Mainland China would most definitely not be happy with this label. The
government that was exiled to what we call Taiwan considers themselves to be
the legitimate government of China. The mainland government considers them to
be illegitimate. This tension still exists politically and culturally.

I have had many Taiwanese friends young and old and most of them prefer
themselves and their culture to be referred to as Chinese.

I have also had some young (mainland) Chinese friends and they, too, are still
very aware of the situation. Even though some of them have Taiwanese friends
themselves, they still look with disdain on Taiwan/RoC as a political entity.

~~~
Hawkee
I visited China about a year ago and was on a train when a local started
talking to me. He asked why I was there and what cities I've seen, mainly
small talk. I had lived in Taiwan for about a year prior so when he told me I
should live in China I said, "well, I lived in Taiwan for a year". His face
went cold and his tone became somewhat ominous. His response was "Taiwan _IS_
China" and in a threatening manner said "RIGHT?". That really made an
impression on me. The Taiwanese people don't consider themselves part of
China, but would someday like to see the ROC regain control of continental
China. When they think of China they think of the People's Republic of China,
the communist China.

