Laconic History of the World
hugepic.io
hugepic.io
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)
And those paragraphs will contain the word "war" many times.
Also, wars are kind of interesting. A good guy (us) and bad guy (them) is a fail-proof way to make a story mildly interesting.
I guess there's other lessons we should learn from history (as opposed to trial and error, or observation). Political systems are a good one - there's things we could learn from the Greeks which could apply today (like sortition, as a way to stop career politicians getting too powerful, but still giving the decision makers enough power that they have an incentive to properly study the issue). We could also learn about dealing with natural disasters, resource exploitation, and the history of moral panics.
And the good guys always win! (or the winners are the ones who are left to call themselves the good guys)
And this makes sense: most soldiers spend most of their time waiting around for battles or marching from one battle to the next. The actual battles themselves take up very little of their time (even if they're extremely stressful).
The stories of those that lived through wars as civilians (the vast majority of people) of course never talk about technology and tactics as they had nothing to do with them.
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 :)
[1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-peopl...
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%... (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.
No surprises here.
In case of Russian language doing it properly is noticeably harder because Russian is an inflected language.
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...
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
In Argentina:
[ 53] president
[ 50] argentine
[ 47] war
[ 46] military
Brazil:
[ 28] military
[ 22] portuguese
[ 19] portugal
[ 16] first
[ 15] war
Saudi Arabia:
[ 114] saudi
[ 76] arabia
[ 37] king
[ 31] oil
[ 28] arab
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
United_States
[ 118] war
[ 108] states
[ 96] american
[ 78] united
[ 42] first
[ 37] president
[ 35] rights
[ 35] world
[ 34] government
[ 33] economic
England
[ 57] henry
[ 57] king
[ 54] english
[ 43] government
[ 41] britain
[ 39] century
[ 38] war
[ 37] edward
[ 34] local
[ 34] kingdom
Brazil
[ 23] military
[ 17] portugal
[ 15] first
[ 14] portuguese
[ 13] years
[ 13] war
[ 13] president
[ 12] political
[ 12] country
[ 10] called
Argentina
[ 51] president
[ 43] military
[ 41] argentine
[ 40] government
[ 37] war
[ 36] political
[ 30] buenos
[ 30] aires
[ 24] against
[ 23] national
Canada
[ 71] british
[ 62] war
[ 53] canadian
[ 38] north
[ 37] french
[ 35] quebec
[ 34] government
[ 34] first
[ 32] american
[ 27] france
Spain
[ 103] spanish
[ 62] war
[ 46] century
[ 39] empire
[ 38] king
[ 34] under
[ 29] peninsula
[ 29] first
[ 28] roman
[ 27] country
Portugal
[ 99] portuguese
[ 28] first
[ 25] war
[ 22] king
[ 21] spanish
[ 20] independence
[ 19] east
[ 19] republic
[ 18] between
[ 18] main
Russia
[ 105] soviet
[ 105] russian
[ 68] war
[ 52] union
[ 43] citation
[ 41] century
[ 39] europe
[ 39] state
[ 38] government
[ 37] moscow
Germany
[ 240] german
[ 88] war
[ 74] empire
[ 68] east
[ 63] states
[ 57] west
[ 55] france
[ 55] prussia
[ 46] austria
[ 42] between
France
[ 221] french
[ 151] war
[ 114] louis
[ 95] king
[ 68] paris
[ 56] against
[ 52] government
[ 52] republic
[ 49] would
[ 49] empire
Japan
[ 89] japanese
[ 58] war
[ 50] emperor
[ 40] main
[ 37] military
[ 37] china
[ 35] imperial
[ 35] ashikaga
[ 35] power
[ 34] government
China
[ 127] dynasty
[ 62] chinese
[ 29] han
[ 26] emperor
[ 26] shang
[ 25] zhou
[ 25] ming
[ 22] empire
[ 20] military
[ 20] main
Saudi_Arabia
[ 83] saudi
[ 48] arabia
[ 28] oil
[ 28] king
[ 21] hejaz
[ 21] arab
[ 19] mecca
[ 18] first
[ 16] saud
[ 16] stateIf 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.
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
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!
* 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.
I'd say it's right on the mark.
@atsaloti "New" really should have been excluded as the most frequent word. It appears a lot in the names of New Guinea, New South Wales, New Holland... It would be interesting to know what word came afterwards in frequency.
[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/omnitarian/8288065763/sizes/o/i...
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.
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.
Stop spreading this nonsense meme.
It's a great map: it provides an easily digestible visualization of the limitations of history writing.
Decent idea, terrible implementation.
So it makes sense :-)
This confuses me greatly.
C'mon there are many funnier and truer word i can think of
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.