How Thomas van Linge Mapped Islamic State | Hacker News Reader

How Thomas van Linge Mapped Islamic State

spiegel.de

44 pointsjonbaer11 comments

Unreal. I've been looking at his maps for months in /r/syriancivilwar but had no idea that they were produced by a 19 year-old. I assumed that they were produced by a journalist in the region or an aid group.

I thought the same; There are full grown people who struggle with this type of mapping on a daily basis but can't match the accuracy of this teenager. Its interesting to see the kid behind the magic.

And he does it _in Paint_. I obviously spend too much time on technology and too little on content.

Isn't this article exposing him to significant danger?

Given that he is physically not exposed to loyalists of any if the parties to these conflicts, probably not.

I don't think so. It seems he is on emailing terms with the PR people of many of the Islamic groups.

With so many groups fighting it out for power, getting public credit for your actions is extremely important. Money, recruits, (and maybe fear) follow apparent success.

As someone who worked on crisis mapping stuff, how do they know this is ground truth? We had similar problems in Haiti and elsewhere with GIS ops for crisis operations, and with a lot less political value to demarcation of battle front lines and region ownership.

I guess I will have to re-read and check out the maps on /r/syriancivilwar other responders mention.

Often there's video or photo evidence that show whether claims made by the various sides involved in the fighting are true or not. Other times there's uncertainty and it isn't clear who controls this or that village but the big picture generally is very accurate.

That's wild! I wonder if there's a way to potentially animate the maps over time. That would be very enlightening.

This is based on a different mapmaker's work (there are several of them), but is generally what you're looking for:

https://youtu.be/TyHkSEs6dAM

Perfect, thanks, that's really informative!

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