10 March 2019 Buy high-res file -- (copied from Twitter) After reading about Blantyre, Malawi I got curious about other places that were renamed. Areas with significant English or Afrikaans presence avoided renaming. Shoutout to newly christened Eswatini. Also sorry for not including Madagascar, I got lazy.
Biggest Soviet cities 21 April 2017 Русские версии первой и второй карты. When I was looking for the Soviet Union’s largest cities, I couldn’t find any good list, let alone a map. Strange, I thought, considering that Russian Wikipedia seems to have incredibly detailed records of every Soviet city’s population. And yet, nobody had collected them in one place. I managed to find a report titled Статистика для всех (“Statistics For Everyone”) that summarizes the results of the 1989 Soviet Union Census. ...
Biggest Soviet cities 21 April 2017 Recently I had a random thought: why is it that some city articles on Wikipedia are called, for example, Nashville, Tennessee – while others are simply, Seattle or Dallas? Is Nashville simply not culturally significant enough to stand on its own, without the cumbersome state identifier? Wikipedia has extensive policy about the article names for geographical locations, among other things. And for every page of official policy, there are several pages of discussion. ...
Fun with city subreddits 6 February 2017 I’ve been playing with python to try to learn how to make maps using Matplotlib. As it turns out, it’s not all that complicated. Using Reddit’s API I scraped the top 300 posts from the largest city subreddits in the United States and Canada. After some data wrangling I end up with a Pandas dataframe with the coordinates of the city, as well as all the titles of the top 300 posts associated with that city’s reddit. ...