Map-history

View the map

A map of historical events (dots on a map). You can see the Observable notebook version here.

To run the site locally as an Observable Framework site:

Make sure you have Node installed. I'm using v22.13.1.

• Install node dependencies: npm install -g yarn && yarn (install yarn and use yarn to install dependencies)
• yarn dev to run the dev server at https://localhost:3000

Getting events from Wikipedia

This all happens in events.py. To play with the code:

• Install Python
• cd map-history
• python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate to set up and activate a virtual environment
• python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies from requirements.txt

The get_events_on_day function in events.py inspects the Wikimedia "on this day" endpoint for each day of the year and attempts to assemble a record that looks like this:

{
  'year': number, # negative for years in BC
  'month': string,
  'day': number,
  'longitude' number,
  'latitude': number,
  'description': string, # An HTML string
}

If the event description contains references to multiple locations, the function emits an event for each location.

Scraped events as of December 2025 are in src/data/events-by-month/. Each file corresponds to a month.