Maps with a time axis?

May 21, 2011 9:41 AM

Is there an online map that features a time axis? For example, a slider than controls year, and as the year changes, political boundaries and country names update to the appropriate values.
posted by steinwald to Grab Bag (4 answers total)

Google Earth (and Maps, now?) have a slider which allows you to view historic "satellite" images, dating back to the first half of the century in some cities.
posted by alexei at 10:04 AM on May 21, 2011

There's this video of European borders from 1519 - 2006. I suppose you can pause it and scrub the timeline manually.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:39 AM on May 21, 2011

I've always wanted to find something like this, except that in my mind it includes world events as well (á la the the end of a game of Civilization).

There's a couple of videos on youtube that come close: 1000 years in 5 minutes (Europe); 1000BC-1000AD. Check out some of the related videos and see what you can find.

I also found this immigration map (NYT) that mimics the style for a different subject.

Part of me wonders if the reason this doesn't appear to exist is that it's practically impossible to actually create. But I'm hoping someone out there has figured it out...
posted by Acey at 7:19 AM on May 22, 2011

Dang, I was hoping someone would come up with something, because I've wanted something like this ever since I discovered The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, which has a series of maps like this.

Acey, I don't think it's impossible, but there are a lot of difficulties. How do you represent the data? Any given political unit is actually an irregular 3-dimensional solid -- think of cutting out the area representing the US from a map for 1775, 1776, ...., 2010, and stacking them one on top of the other.
posted by benito.strauss at 3:39 PM on May 25, 2011