Interactive Historical Atlas of the World

[alcibaides]

Please check out my new website: ChronoAtlas.com, the first fully interactive historical atlas of the world!

The site allows you to browse the entire globe at any point in history and see boundaries changing over time and cities and other features appearing on the map at the time they were founded. The site is also 100% interactive, you can contribute your own data: meaning your own cities, battles, and photos of historic places and events, and you can also draw boundaries of any historical kingdom you want, or edit those drawn by others if they are inaccurate.

You need to have either Google Earth or the Google Earth plug-in to view the site, if you don’t have it then it will prompt you to install the plug-in on your first visit.
For optimum performance I recommend installing the latest version of Google Earth or the Google Earth plug-in and using Internet Explorer as your browser.

The site has just been launched so feel free to suggest improvements or if you get any error messages then please let me know and I will try to fix them. There are also some video tutorials on how to do stuff if you get stuck.

 

[alcibaides]

I have made a lot of improvements to my interactive historical atlas. On the main viewer you can now zoom to any place or any date with the click of a single button.

I have also been working on making it easier to draw and edit boundaries, now when you draw and edit boundaries you can see all the cities, castles, and battles that have been contributed to the map to make it easier to determine where you are drawing. Also there is a checkbox to toggle on and off modern boundaries and modern cities to help you in drawing accurate historical boundaries.

I have also created a new concept: Areas of Interest. An Area of Interest is a specific date and location on the globe that you can save and come back to later, you can also send it as a link to other people. A typical Area of Interest might be a specific war or the rise of a specific civilization, or you might simply want to save a time and place where you have contributed a lot of new data to show to your friends or students. Once you create an Area of Interest it will be available to anybody else using ChronoAtlas.com.

So come back to ChronoAtlas.com and I think you will agree that there are some major improvements to the site. I want to make it as fun and user-friendly as possible but I can only do that with your feedback. Let me know how it can be improved and what features you would like to see.

 

[LamaGT]

I like this, it's a lot like the map of EU 3, i always like to scroll dates to see the border changes.
The only bad thing for your site is that there are few nations displayed.
On the technical side i have to say that the year slider is too sensitive and small, so it's hard to get a precise date, other that that it's ok

 

[bob bobato]

Where does the data from the borders come from?
It would be interesting if the borders were present on the microscale; instead of copying the borders as shown in a large map of Europe, the written boundaries were used as a reference. So, then, you could zoom down onto the actual ridges or streams or whatnot and see where the border actually stopped, as you could with modern maps, instead of just a vague line. But I suppose that would be too onerous for one person to do.

 

[Domen]

This can be useful for Polish borders:

http://www.polmap.republika.pl/polska2010.htm

http://www.polmap.republika.pl/

 

[alcibaides]

On the technical side i have to say that the year slider is too sensitive and small, so it's hard to get a precise date, other that that it's ok

You can zoom in on the time slider, there is a little button above that has a magnifying glass, simply press that to zoom in and out to smaller date ranges.

 

[alcibaides]

Where does the data from the borders come from?

The data comes from user contributions, anybody can submit new data for the site, just go to where it says "Contribute" and create an account to get started.

It would be interesting if the borders were present on the microscale; instead of copying the borders as shown in a large map of Europe, the written boundaries were used as a reference. So, then, you could zoom down onto the actual ridges or streams or whatnot and see where the border actually stopped, as you could with modern maps, instead of just a vague line. But I suppose that would be too onerous for one person to do.

The further back in time you go the less precise knowledge we have of borders. Many historical borders are in fact not known with certainity but simply assumed. If you feel that a particular border is erroneous, simply create an account and you can edit it yourself.

 

[Agent327]

Very nice!

But why is there only a Roman empire on the map?

 

[jtb1127]

I have more then Rome. I hope they can get colonial Empires on there. Like the Brits and French. I'd also like Mongolia.

 

[alcibaides]

Very nice!

But why is there only a Roman empire on the map?

When you first load the map up it zooms to 100 AD in the Mediterranean region. I chose this as the initial date and place because this is where the greatest ammount of data has been contributed so far. But you can zoom to any location and any date you want and you will see that already there are many other empires up there, there are over 100, including Byzantines, Franks, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Almohads, Ptolemids, Seleucids, Venetian Empire, Assyrians, Carthage etc.

As more and more people start contributing stuff, the globe will gradually fill up.

 

[dragodon64]

Hi, Alcibiades, I think this is a really amazing project you've got going. I like that users can submit their own maps, but that they're still reviewed before being put up.

However, I haven't been able to figure out how to edit currently existing maps. Specifically, I want to edit the Roman map to include Dacia from 106 to 275. Is there a way to do this without making an entire Roman Empire map?

 

[jtb1127]

The Rome one is really cool

 

[Linkman226]

This is awesomesauce.

 

[Tee Kay]

This is incredibly awesome.

 

[Yui108]

It looks like in your 1174 map you have the Kingdom of Jerusalem at post-Hattin borders.

 

[alcibaides]

Hi, Alcibiades, I think this is a really amazing project you've got going. I like that users can submit their own maps, but that they're still reviewed before being put up.

However, I haven't been able to figure out how to edit currently existing maps. Specifically, I want to edit the Roman map to include Dacia from 106 to 275. Is there a way to do this without making an entire Roman Empire map?

Hi dragodon64, I guess you worked it out because I saw that you succesfully made the edit you wanted. Was it confusing? If so maybe you could suggest a way to make it more easy to work out.

For the benefit of other users, to edit existing boundaries you simply click on the boundary you want to edit and a box appears that says "part of Roman Empire" or whatever the name of the nation is. Below that it tells you who contributed the boundary and in the right hand corner there is some text that says "Edit". If you click on that it will open up a webpage that will allow you to edit the boundary (it's geographic location, it's dates and the name of the nation, etc.).

The most important thing to understand is that a "boundary" is a polygon that represents the shape of a nation during a particular period in time. So each time the boundary of a nation changes, a new boundary must be generated. But the editing tools allow you to effectively "copy and paste" boundaries into new time periods so redrawing the entire boundary again is not neccesary.

When editing a boundary there are 3 options for saving the edits:

1) Replace the existing boundary with my edits
This option does exactly what it says on the button. If you select it the existing boundary will be replaced by the edits you make for the entire time period that it exists.

2) Modify this boundary for just the time period I have specified
If you wanted to modify a nation's boundary for a particular period (say adding in Dacia to the Roman Empire from 106 to 275 AD), you would choose this option. It "inserts" the new edited boundary into the existing boundary for the date window you specify and leaves the boundaries for the date period before and after your dates unchanged.

3) Submit this edit as a new seperate boundary
With this third option, you are simply using the existing boundary as a 'template' to create a new boundary. If you choose this option, you will leave the original boundary you were editing unchanged and your edits will appear as a new seperate boundary. When you choose this option your dates should not overlap with the dates of the original boundary you were editing, otherwise the boundaries will overlap with each other for that time period. A good time to use this option is when you have already drawn in the boundary of say the Roman Empire for the period 80-117 AD, and you want to now add in a slight change for the period from 117 AD onwards, you could use the first drawn boundary as a template and just modify the boundary slightly to reflect a couple of additional conquests or withdrawals.

Now here are some tips for editing:

1) You can modify a polygon by simply clicking and dragging the points that make up the polygon with the mouse cursor.

2) To remove unneeded points you can simply double-click on them and they will disapear.

3) For reference purposes, there is a little tick box above the map that says "View Modern Boundaries and Cities for Reference Purposes", this allows you to get a better idea of exactly where you are on the globe. With this tickbox on, the more you zoom in, the more smaller towns and local administrative boundaries will appear on the map.

And that is about it, I hope it all makes sense. If you get stuck with anything just let me know and I can answer all your questions. There is also a video tutorial I made about editing an existing boundary to save it as a new boundary here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAsI8LrEtEo

 

[alcibaides]

It looks like in your 1174 map you have the Kingdom of Jerusalem at post-Hattin borders.

There is no Kingdom of Jerusalem in the map yet. I have purposefully left it out for now because I created a video tutorial for adding in new boundaries using the Kingdom of Jerusalem as the example here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ChronoAtlas#p/a/u/0/V4M1PXn8mlg

It may be harder for people to follow along in the video tutorial when the thing they are trying to draw is already on the map. But you are right that the existing boundary for the Ayyubid Sultanate that somebody contributed is reflecting the post Hattin borders and that will need to be edited for the date period prior to Hattin and post-1099. That is in fact an easy edit, you would use the second edit option: Modify this boundary for just the time period I have specified.

 

[warpus]

This is pretty awesome.

What sort of javascript framework do you use for this?

Are you pulling in the data from KML or KMZ files? If so, how?

Hope you don't mind me asking these technical questions..

 

[JtheJackal]

A suggestion I have is able to upload different pictures for cities (or other locations) depending on the time period.

 

[alcibaides]

That is a good suggestion and it has come up before. The only issue with it is that I want to make the interface for uploading cities as simple as possible so that people don't get too confused. If people have to input start and end dates for their city and then another start date and end date for their image then it could get confusing.

For advanced users, the way to accomplish what you are suggesting at the moment is to simply add in seperate point features for seperate date periods. For example if you go to where Instanbul is, you will see that there are different photo features for different time periods, there are about 4 or 5 I think "Byzantium, Early Constantinople, Late Constantinople, Insatnbul, etc.

Another example is New York, there are 7 seperate photo features for each period of New York history:

New Amsterdam
Colonial New York
Early Nineteenth Century New York
Late Nineteenth Century New York
Early Twentieth Century New York
Late Twentieth century New York
21st century New York

Each one has a different photo and different wikipedia link. The start year of each one begins in the end year of the previous one so that there are no gaps in time.