Tag: world maps
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Who’s on the mountains? The birthplaces of the people the world’s peaks are named after
I linked 2,228 mountains named after people to their namesakes’ birthplaces. 84% of the person-named peaks of Australia and New Zealand honour someone born on another continent.
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The renamed world: who changed the names of places, and why
Tsaritsyn, Stalingrad, Volgograd. I read every dated official name of a place in Wikidata and found 6,842 true renamings, in waves of revolution, its undoing, war, independence and nation-building. The busiest year of all: Romania, 1964.
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Who named Antarctica? Twenty thousand place names, the nations that gave them and the people they honour
I mapped 20,151 Antarctic place names by who named them, when and after whom. America and Britain named 46% of the continent, and only 3.4% of the people honoured are women.
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Black rivers, white springs: the colours of the world’s place names
I found 138,453 places named after a colour, in 20 languages. Rivers run black, springs run white, the commonest colour name on Earth is Cerro Colorado, and a fifth of Russia’s red is revolutionary.
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The star fort belt: how the bastion spread around the world
I mapped 1,307 star forts in ink, from Palmanova to Hakodate. Only 19% can be dated, but the dates tell a clear story: the bastion did not creep out of Italy, it sailed, reaching India, Morocco and the Caribbean as early as Germany and England.
