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Hi all,
I created "Borderline", a border drawing game a few weeks ago.
Since then, thousands of people have played it and I have accumulated over 37,000 drawings, which are now all stacked on a blank canvas.
This allows you to see the world as people remember it.
You can also check similar maps for the US, France, the UK, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.
Alternatively, you can also draw a few borders yourself (free, no signin required)
That was quite fun, and I enjoyed the data mining aspect of it. Quite edifying, thanks!
Thanks for your kind words. I love how the sum of all the errors still makes something that is correct :)
The game is really cool, but it allowed me to cheat on mobile when asked for coastal lines: it shows the actual coastal line for a second, then draws the rest of the map over. Also, it said Belgium is landlocked.
Thanks for the bug report I will fix these asap!
Unrelated: what is "habibi"? To me (and I know nothing), it always sounded like a pejorative term for franco-arabs but I never bothered to validate
It just means "my beloved"/"my dear".
It means “my love” in Arabic but you can also use it with friends
So in this case it would roughly be "my lovely code"? Or "Code, my loves"?
It doesn't mean too much beside a funny name, and my love for the Arabic language
Habibi is a gendered term. 'Habibi' is used towards men (regardless of the gender of the speaker). 'Habibti' is used towards women (regardless of the gender of the speaker). 'Habaybi' when addressing groups. Expect giggles when you confuse the first two.
it means “my love” but sometimes we also use it like how american southerners say “bless your heart” or africans say “my brother in christ”, so that might why you have a negative connotation of it
Can this be divided per drawer's country? I'd love to see how Americans draw the world map, versus, say, British or German.
I do not collect user data so currently this is not possible.
I could ask as an opt-in as it would be interesting for sure
You could likely cluster individuals by drawn features; might not tells us much about geographic origin but may reveal interesting differences/levels in geographic aptitude, and which clusters correspond best to what land borders/contintents.
You can already see below the map the per country drawings and stats, and I will for sure use this data to produce new viz along the way
Yeah, I think that would be neat.
Started doing it with a modal asking players to provide the info after reading the comment. Already more than 1k drawings in with the data
I'd be curious about the same thing but with world capitals, and high school math. Especially by generation, not just country.
You hear a lot of things (both positive and negative) about various countries and their education, it would be interesting to see some actual data.
One unsurprising trend I have noticed is that countries that value education more highly, put more effort (and more money) into it.
This is one of my long term goals with my site
Collect user-generated data (drawings, answers) through games and interactive pages, then measure the results and compare to open data sets or against common conceptions
well it would scratch my itch of curiosity but i think it would be a cool experiment survey type thing cuz we'd know how people from deferent regions perceive and understand other countries
We Swedes also try to ignore the Danes as much as possible
Neat! I wonder how they deal with people using possibly different map projections?
The data collection is standardised through my border drawing game so no issue with that
I think the question comes from (or is at least related to) the recent UN vote on moving from Mercator to Equal Earth projection.
What people are drawing isn't the "truth" on average. First, nobody has seen the world from actual far away (space) and is just using what they remember from school or other media. And second, there is no "truth" because we are fundamentally dealing with a 2d projection of the 3d surface of a sphere and there are many different projections, all with advantages and disadvantages, neither being more correct than any other.
I was wondering the same thing, but playing it you only fill in small border segments at a time, with the rest of the map filled in, so the projection doesn't change much.
LOL: nobody pays attention to South America and South Sahara.
Very few countries without lines within the actual boundaries. China and Brazil almost have some internal clean core. Russia also, but with considerably reduced core, somehow like Spain, and maybe France.
For some "narrow stripped" lands, that’s not that surprising, that lines also overlap so much in the middle, but for some countries with very distant straight lined boundaries, it’s far more astonishing. Some really looks like "drow some random strokes" was the sole instruction.