37,500 border drawings: a map of the world as people remember it

[OP] nicocarsui | 13 hours ago

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)

hellerve | 13 hours ago

That was quite fun, and I enjoyed the data mining aspect of it. Quite edifying, thanks!

[OP] nicocarsui | 13 hours ago

Thanks for your kind words. I love how the sum of all the errors still makes something that is correct :)

otherme123 | 8 hours ago

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.

[OP] nicocarsui | 8 hours ago

Thanks for the bug report I will fix these asap!

pluc | 11 hours ago

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

LtWorf | 11 hours ago

It just means "my beloved"/"my dear".

[OP] nicocarsui | 11 hours ago

It means “my love” in Arabic but you can also use it with friends

pluc | 10 hours ago

So in this case it would roughly be "my lovely code"? Or "Code, my loves"?

[OP] nicocarsui | 10 hours ago

It doesn't mean too much beside a funny name, and my love for the Arabic language

kweks | 6 hours ago

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.

recursive-call | 9 hours ago

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

minervawes | 10 hours ago

Can this be divided per drawer's country? I'd love to see how Americans draw the world map, versus, say, British or German.

[OP] nicocarsui | 9 hours ago

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

dleeftink | 9 hours ago

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.

[OP] nicocarsui | 9 hours ago

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

pyreko | 6 hours ago

Yeah, I think that would be neat.

[OP] nicocarsui | 6 hours ago

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

andai | 9 hours ago

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.

[OP] nicocarsui | 9 hours ago

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

cwmoore | 2 hours ago

My county in the US, the level that manages education, is a rectangle.

Phineas_here | 8 hours ago

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

baalimago | 9 hours ago

We Swedes also try to ignore the Danes as much as possible

jeremyscanvic | 9 hours ago

Neat! I wonder how they deal with people using possibly different map projections?

[OP] nicocarsui | 8 hours ago

The data collection is standardised through my border drawing game so no issue with that

teiferer | 7 hours ago

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.

tveita | 8 hours ago

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.

jcranmer | 5 hours ago

The red lines are the only segments filled in via small border segments; the green and the blue lines require you to do much more of the country's outline.

diego_moita | 8 hours ago

LOL: nobody pays attention to South America and South Sahara.

psychoslave | 8 hours ago

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.

jcranmer | 5 hours ago

At least on the easy mode, you're given the names of major cities, coastlines, rivers, and major roads. The city names are also given a gloss in both English and the local script, if the local script is not in Latin.

For a country like China, whose neighboring countries do not use the same language, you can get a reasonably good guess as to its borders simply by drawing in the space between city names written in hanzi and nearby cities without those names.

muslimrooftoppa | 5 hours ago

Also including Portland'n'Seattle?