War Atlas: An Interactive Map of Every Named War in Human History
War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history
I have built an interactive cartography project that visualizes every named war in human history spanning 5,000 years. This dynamic map allows users to explore conflicts from 3000 BCE to the present day, offering a unique perspective on the scale and frequency of global violence throughout time.
Loading 5,000 years of history...
- suid
Grumble about the graphics choices: dark-grey-on-black-with-other-dark-colors is a terrible color scheme, that renders the borders nearly invisible.
There's a reason print maps have a standard set of colors, with very light blue for oceans, white for land backgrounds, and a variety of dark colors for features. The "modern white-on-black web aesthetic" only really works for text- and figure-heavy pages, where you must then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.
- krick
FF just crashed immediately. Twice. Which kinda surprised me in a good way, because usually when it struggles for memory it just hangs there for a couple of minutes until it gets killed by the OS. Cannot remember it being killed that easily by another website.
- WesleyLivesay
Cool visuals, as with everything like this where the creator probably just churned open datasets through LLMs there are many inaccuracies particularly around borders.
An interesting effort though, and at least this one has a decent page about sourcing.
- andrewmutz
Interestingly, this website reliably crashes my firefox on linux while consuming 55GB of memory.
Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."
- konart
That moment when you go from stop 7 to stop 8 in Exhibit, from Grand Duchy of Moscow to Russian Empire...