The average American does not know the location of Transoxiana or Khwarezm. In and of itself, this is not a problem (I’d be kind of worried if it was), but it makes explaining matters of the distant past easier if they have a visual sense of the area you’re talking about, and “I think that’s modern day Tajikistan” often doesn’t help. As a person who often finds himself discussing these things (the gods call on me to educate the masses in matters weird and trivial, I suppose), I’ve taken to carrying around a small folder of maps. Unfortunately, most of what I have is at different scales and colorings, often with landmarks inconsistently pictured.
Rather than hunting down more similar physical types, it seems to me I ought to be able to just do it digitally, so I’m looking for a program that’ll let me zoomably and scrollably display a political map, with an overlay function that’ll let me slap a ‘here’s the region now/in 784’ on top of it. Ideally, it’ll also have a sizable library of maps already installed, or at least the ability to easily add more. This kind of software isn’t something I have experience with, so what I’m looking for may not actually exist, but it doesn’t seem like something impossible to create. Anyone have any suggestions?
I think you’re talking about a GIS (geospatial information system) - these allow you to have many different map layers at different scales - comprising image-based (raster) and drawn-line (vector) maps.
Usually they have some sort of ‘base’ mapping which may be an official paid-for, surveyed map, or maybe just something like openstreetmap. Additional map layers can be created - with the map content being ‘registered’ for placement/orientation/scaling against the base mapping.
There are expensive, corporate versions of this such as ArcGIS and MapInfo, and there are free, open-source ones too.
What’s that, you say? You’re trying to show where Transoxiana, Khwarezm, and Tajikistan are?
Me thinks you’re hanging out in the wrong types of bars. Does your mother know?
In all seriousness, I’m subscribing to this thread: when you find a solution, please share. I’d be interested. Thanks!
Here’s one called QGIS that my colleagues in Emergency Planning use as a fallback (because it can be run entirely from a USB stick, making it good for scenarios where computer networks/infrastructure might be unavailable).
I think the learning curve might be a bit steep, but that’s sort of inherent in the task you are attempting.
QGIS is a great open-source alternative to expensive GIS software like ArcGIS. Unfortunately, I’ve found that its one weakness is precisely in the kind if thing the OP wants to do – quickly and easily create a pretty, well-drawn map. Still, if he/she has a week with some free time, learning the basics of the program might be just the thing. Shouldn’t be hard at all to find a data set of country polygons that includes a “name” attribute field, assign the symbology such that the desired one is highlighted (e.g., colored red) while the rest have mere wire-mesh outlines, and save the map as a JPEG or PDF to show on a monitor, send to someone as an email attachment, upload to Facebook, or print out.
I just noticed the OP wants to highlight sub-national regions. If he/she uses something like QGIS, that will take a little more work than what I just described above. I see three options:
Find a free database with sub-national region polygons that the OP wants to highlight. You may get lucky, you may not.
Start with the all-countries polygon data set, and learn how to edit it (with QGIS). You need to chop up (cut) the country into regions. Or, start a new polygon vector data set (there are many possible formats – “feature class” is the general term in ArcGIS) – and create the single region polygon yourself. Either way, you need some base layer(s) to guide you as you draw or cut. You should be able to find them pretty easily – e.g., major cities (points) or major rivers (lines). (Using a base layer directly to cleanly cut out or build your polygon, rather than just digitally draw it by hand, takes a little more GIS skill).
Forget the whole GIS thing and use a drawing program – freeware, or comes-with-your-computer stuff like Paint, or expensive software like Adobe Illustrator – download a free map of the world (takes seconds) with a minimum of distracting text and clutter drawn on it (you could even use a “blank” map – showing, say, just national borders, used for high school exams and such) – and highlight your preferred region “by hand” (digitally draw on the map).
The web site is huge. I haven’t done much with this free stuff. I’m a GIS programmer/analyst for County Gov. I really only work with our own local data that we create with ArcMap.
(my home internet is very slow and data is limited, otherwise I’d search the site for you a bit more)
GIS is overkill for this. Wikipedia would be far simpler.
Not as fancy, but infinitely easier.
The hard part is not the map drawing portion, but the data – somebody has to bother drawing all those historical political boundaries, and then making it free available for people to use. If you’re willing to do that yourself (draw area on an existing map), you can easily do so with www.caltopo.com by selecting Google Maps as your base layer, drawing the shapes, and then sharing your work. No software installs necessary, and easy to share with anybody you want.
Edit: As Isildur said, Google Earth would work just fine too. Just click the “Add polygon” button at the top.
