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When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

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Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#51

Post by smcl »

jhgb wrote: post #10

I thought that "political maps" simply meant sovereign state borders (as it does in Czech, German, and possibly other languages as well), and that this would be about unchanging borders. For example Bohemia has had some pretty stable natural borders. But in this case "political map" means a map of election results? Is that a common usage in English?

In English it has in my experience just referred to maps that emphasise human layers more than geological ones. Like you would see national borders, state or county borders, settlements marked on the map, rather than contours, terrain etc. I guess this does make it suitable for looking at electoral results but I think the “political” here refers to this - administrative divisions, not election or polling

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#52

Post by not2b »

300bps wrote: post #11
thinkingemote wrote: post #7

Peeve: To cause to be annoyed or resentful. synonym: annoy. These are not pet peeves at all, they are the persons pet loves. All examples are a type of "look at this great example, designed not to annoy or cause resentment at all, just the opposite! Aren't they cool and amazing?"

I studied French for four years and I'm sure there are all kinds of things that I say in that language that would confuse native French speakers as much as François Valentin confused us with an errant use of "pet peeve". I think he probably meant to say, "pet projects".

My favorite is when a French colleague wanted to send some "demands" to a customer. He meant "questions", "demander" = "to ask", he didn't realize that "demand" has a very different implication in English. Fortunately this was caught before he sent that email.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#53

Post by gbear605 »

jhgb wrote: post #10

I thought that "political maps" simply meant sovereign state borders (as it does in Czech, German, and possibly other languages as well), and that this would be about unchanging borders. For example Bohemia has had some pretty stable natural borders. But in this case "political map" means a map of election results? Is that a common usage in English?

As a native English speaker “political map” means to me both specifically “sovereign state borders” and generally “a map that relates to politics”. If I’m on Google Maps and there’s a button that says “show political map”, I would expect country borders, but if someone tells me “here are some political maps” then I’m expecting anything that has to do with politics.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#54

Post by [deleted] »

thinkingemote wrote: post #7

Peeve: To cause to be annoyed or resentful. synonym: annoy. These are not pet peeves at all, they are the persons pet loves. All examples are a type of "look at this great example, designed not to annoy or cause resentment at all, just the opposite! Aren't they cool and amazing?"

[deleted]

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#55

Post by not2b »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #22

I’m sceptical, it’s too easy to cherry-pick data to make it look supportive of one’s political agenda. Not saying it’s the case here, I just wouldn’t trust too much "obvious" patterns and easy to understand maps from a twitter thread. More often than not, such threads are omitting data that doesn’t support the view of the author. Reality is rarely obvious and simple.

Oh, come on: he had numerous examples from all over the world where the political implications are quite different. The author's view was simply that old political boundaries have lingering effects, and he demonstrated that very well.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#56

Post by yolo69420 »

kllvql wrote: post #38
fguerraz wrote: post #16

This seems to be complete BS to me: all I see in these maps is a lot of confirmation bias, the author really sees what he wants to see. Some maps do overlap very well but in that case it only looks interesting because we want to see a causation link where there is correlation. So sorry for the harsh words but I actually find this upsetting.

I completely understand your point. Misinterpreting correlation with causation is something that frequently bothers me in writings and discussions. In this case, however, I did find the correlations the author pointed out interesting. I did not interpret this as causal (the author may have made that claim, but I was more interested in the maps). I still found it really cool to see how much an impact geography and pat…

I don't quite think you understand. The data presented here absolutely does not allow for the conclusions you make particularly in your second paragraph. In fact the reality could be exactly the opposite way (i.e. geography has no influence on things like modern election results whatsoever) and you wouldn't know it based on this data.

Think about the countless numbers of ways you could overlay any sort of historical map over some map representing any kind of relevant statistic. A smaller but still countless number of them will have strong correlations by pure chance alone. This is a simple fact of statistics.

The author here is filtering out exactly those that happen to have those kinds of correlations backed by some preconceived ideas the author has about how the causality is supposed to work and uses them to fuel his hypotheses, while ignoring the uncountable number of map overlays that don't show these correlations.

This is bog standard selection bias.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#57

Post by shaftoe444 »

English historian Robert Tombs has lots of good examples of this for English history. Typically I can't find a good picture now but English Civil War vs Brexit voting patterns is a good example: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/files/2018/03/Screen-Shot-201....

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#58

Post by Mordisquitos »

thinkingemote wrote: post #7

Peeve: To cause to be annoyed or resentful. synonym: annoy. These are not pet peeves at all, they are the persons pet loves. All examples are a type of "look at this great example, designed not to annoy or cause resentment at all, just the opposite! Aren't they cool and amazing?"

Another more serious mistake is that further down the thread he refers to the DDR as a "former Soviet Republic", which it absolutely was not.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#60

Post by vehemenz »

fguerraz wrote: post #16

This seems to be complete BS to me: all I see in these maps is a lot of confirmation bias, the author really sees what he wants to see. Some maps do overlap very well but in that case it only looks interesting because we want to see a causation link where there is correlation. So sorry for the harsh words but I actually find this upsetting.

Just because the author used only confirmatory evidence doesn't mean that there isn't a correlation or a causal factor at play. The author didn't posit a theory; he merely pointed out that the maps are interesting. Which they are.

Sure, you could probably pick arbitrary political boundaries from different times and create maps that show the opposite trend. However, I would be surprised if there weren't correlative or causal factors, given that historical people reproduced and, in the case of many agrarian peoples, didn't migrate. It's possible that our collective ignorance of history makes this appear to be a novel fact, when we shouldn't be too surprised.

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