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  • Henrik Schönemannlavaeolus@fedihum.org
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:30 PM

    @terratempora Cliopatria, as described here?
    doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-045

    At the very least, make the following caveats from the paper prominently visible to your users:
    1) "Many of the original source maps, which are themselves drawn by hand, employ different cartographic display techniques (e.g., stipple patterns, blurred edges, etc.) to suggest both the uncertain extent and location of some (but not all) borders."

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    @JubalBarca

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  • Henrik Schönemannlavaeolus@fedihum.org
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:30 PM

    @terratempora
    1) cont.
    "However, every known digital encoding of historical polity data, including Cliopatria, use industry-standard digital graphical primitives (raster encodings or polygons formed by latitude and longitude pairs) that are unable, by themselves, to capture this uncertainty which could then be used to inform display techniques or analytic computations."

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    @JubalBarca

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  • Henrik Schönemannlavaeolus@fedihum.org
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:32 PM

    @terratempora
    2) "In spite of our attempts to reflect the most current historical knowledge, we acknowledge that Cliopatria’s representation of world history reflects only one version of the territories held by past polities. Thus, we warn users that currently unquantified uncertainty exists and they may need to account for it somehow in their analyses."

    Especially 2) feels to me like a cop-out: Nowhere do the authors acknowledge the inherent bias of existing maps.

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    @JubalBarca

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  • Henrik Schönemannlavaeolus@fedihum.org
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:35 PM

    @terratempora
    Cont.

    Also the fact that many maps in many existing publications don't claim to give accurate info down to the specific borders & time, but a larger overview / illustrations of specific points.
    All of that gets squashed down in their dataset and uncritically reproduced by your project

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    @JubalBarca

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  • Edgar @Terra Temporaterratempora@mastodon.social
    Nov 6, 2026, 4:50 PM

    @lavaeolus thanks, I'll add a disclaimer that this is an Amateur website with approximation in the border to simplify for most people. While continuing to fix the issue as I see them or when they are reported.

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  • Henrik Schönemannlavaeolus@fedihum.org
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:22 PM

    @terratempora thanks for engaging with me :)

    But the issues run deeper than 'borders are approximations'.
    It starts with the base map for example: Coastlines, rivers, lakes, other geographic features changed quite a lot over the last 5000 years, which had profound impact on people and where they lived etc. There isn't one single basemap that can cover this.
    Did you think about this?

    You owe it to your users to show what the source for each claim is. Simply "Cliopatria" is not enough

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  • Henrik Schönemannlavaeolus@fedihum.org
    Nov 6, 2026, 5:30 PM

    @terratempora
    Because Cliopatria is only an aggregate, but not the original source of the claims

    In general: The reason why a dataset like Cliopatria and a viewer like yours didn't exist before is not because people didn't recognize the potential, but because it's very very hard to do the subject justice

    @JubalBarca pointed you to whgazetteer.org as a starting point to see how other projects deal with those issues

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