[maze-le]

Hi there,

is it possible to have different shapes for different timesteps? The borders of the states of today were very different 120 years ago. Some were radically diffrent (Germany, Russia), some didn't even exist (Slovakia, Croatia, Sub Sahara-African Nations), some don't exist anymore today (Austro-Hungarian Empire).

[mapipedia]

Hi, thanks for your question. It kind of is. I would like to get to the point where I could change the maps over time to accurately represent things. However, there is some limited capacity to do it now through the use of region groups. So you can't change the regions themselves, but you can group them together. For example, you could model USSR as Russia and some of the Eastern European countries (I haven't created a youtube video on how to do that yet, but it's pretty easy - there is an example in the USA formation animation where Virginia gets split into West Virginia and Virginia around 1863). Region groups were also created to represent data on larger scales. For example if you want to represent a sales region for Western Europe you could group those countries together in a region group. Then your CSV data would only need to have one row for 'Western Europe' that would then shade all the regions in that group.

[maze-le]

Thanks for the fast reply, the grouping option sounds like a good solution as a first step -- there might be instances where this is not applicable -- especially if you'r going further back in time [e.g. the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire were radically different to the german Bundesländer today].

Very cool project btw...

[mapipedia]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I would love to be able to show the actual boundaries changing over time. I've thought of a way to do that but don't have the data, but I think it wouldn't be too hard to do. Another idea I was thinking about was for the CSV data itself to help define the boundary. For example, if you wanted to track the amount of land that ISIS had over time, your CSV data could define which towns (or lat/lon) belonged to which group and then page could 'join the dots' to create the boundaries. Then the boundaries could be created arbitrarily. There would be some other complications that would need to be solved, but that's one of the ideas I've been thinking about.