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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions.

I like that idea. It could be really interesting and educating to play with an interactive map showing that. There are things like that appearing from time to time (like the article about Syria and Iraq from yesterday[0]); I hope that concept trend will catch on and we'll see more and more old and modern history knowledge expressed in interactive, explorable forms.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985305

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I think it would be good to have a map and timeline like that going back to the 10th century. Because I think that people _really_ could use some perspective.

Kind of an unified, explorable map of historical events, in which you can see how the borders looked like, could see various information overlays like trade routes, major wars, events, etc.? It's quite an endeavour but I believe a worthy one, and I hope a project like that will start soon.

This could have tremendous effect on people. It's BretVictoresque stuff, things that could expand the space of thoughts we have, and vastly increase our comprehention of information available.

Relevant, Making History Available: http://lesswrong.com/lw/j0/making_history_available/

>To my former memory, the United States had always existed—there was never a time when there was no United States. I had not remembered, until that time, how the Roman Empire rose, and brought peace and order, and lasted through so many centuries, until I forgot that things had ever been otherwise; and yet the Empire fell, and barbarians overran my city, and the learning that I had possessed was lost. The modern world became more fragile to my eyes; it was not the first modern world.

>So many mistakes, made over and over and over again, because I did not remember making them, in every era I never lived...

A great article, thanks for linking it and also posting the most important quotes for this discussion.

I toyed with this idea for my senior thesis back in college (and obviously never did it). My idea was to somehow identify specific geographic references in Wikipedia and correlate them with as specific a point in time as is possible, based on the context of the surrounding article, using the links between articles to show how people, events and places were related across time and space, somehow visualizing those connections.

(note all the "somehows")

In the end I took on a similar but much less difficult problem but the original idea has always been at the back of my mind.

somehow I think a supercomputer would come in handy for that, and who knows, someone is already "on it"! definitely interesting way to "see" this sort of information

I have wanted this for a few years now. This would definitely put things in perspective and make lots of people (and me!) understand history much better.

Too bad I am not competent enough to actually build something like this. I would definitely be up for helping out, though.

For immediate satisfaction you might search history map of the world on YouTube. There are plenty of videos. At the other extreme you might buy an historical atlas. In between there are sites like http://www.chronoatlas.com/

The youtube one is a joke, it's got a lot if inacurracies, and it's not just about borders, but more importantly populations. That is what the Middle East is ultimately learning.

You might want to have a look a Centennia:

"CENTENNIA is a map-based guide to the history of Europe and the Middle East from the beginning of the 11th century to the present. It is a dynamic, animated historical atlas including over 9,000 border changes. The map controls evolve the map forward or backward in time bringing the static map to life. Our maps display every major war and territorial conflict displaying the status of each region at intervals of a tenth of a year."

http://www.clockwk.com

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