User talk:Ascended Dreamer

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-- Wikimedia Commons Welcome (talk) 19:52, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

File:Kingdom of Hungary counties.svg and File:Ethnic Map of Hungary 1910 with Counties.png

Hi. I have reverted your edits to File:Kingdom of Hungary counties.svg:

• The file you uploaded is not a true SVG, merely a raster image contained within an SVG file. This should be avoided. (See {{FakeSVG}}.)
• Some of the borders are not accurate:
  • The border between Bars/Hont erroneously gives the Léva (Levice) district to Hont when it should belong to Bars.
  • The border between Csongrád/Bács-Bodrog seems to follow the modern Serbian-Hungarian border in the east, but it shouldn't: the settlements of Backi vinogradi and Horgos should belong to Csongrád.
  • There are a few distorted/misplaced borders, the most prominent of which are the southern border of Szerém/Syrmia County, which is too far north (relative to the other borders; maybe the others are too far south), the border of Komárom county with Poszony and Nytra counties, and the borders between Komárom, Győr, Fejér and Veszprém.

These border inaccuracies also seem to apply to your other file File:Ethnic Map of Hungary 1910 with Counties.png. I have applied a rough fix to the Bars/Hont and Csongrád/Bács-Bodrog borders on this file but there's only so much I can do with only the .png to work with.

Alphathon /ˈæɫfə.θɒn/ ^(talk) 08:43, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, I am especially amazed by the big error I made with the border of Bars and Hont Counties. I went ahead and incorporated your corrections into the Ethnic Map file, I have updated it. I was not able to find errors involving Szerém County or the area around Komárom County with one small exception. I have also made these fixes to the County Map, which I upload here.

I know little to nothing of Inkscape and SVG image format, apologies for mistakenly creating a fake SVG. My impression is that SVG is useful due to scalability, but the County Map which I had overwritten with my fake SVG is so lacking in detail/accuracy, I wonder why it is in SVG anyway. Would it be worthwhile attempting to make this image into a true SVG?

Also, I am impressed by your noticing of the errors; what is your resource that helped you to spot them?

Ascended Dreamer (talk) 21:38, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

My original intention was to simply fix the Bars/Hont and Csongrád/Bács-Bodrog borders (which I noticed just by looking at the image, having worked quite a lot with maps of the Austrian Empire/Austria-Hungary before), and found the other errors while trying to "line up" my source maps. (I also noticed that the easternmost part of Syrmia, just across from Belgrade, was a bit too "pointy", but didn't realise why until I checked it.) It was only when I went to do the fixing after that that I noticed it wasn't a true SVG.

Would I be right in saying you're working with individual county maps or similar, rather than a single map of the whole kingdom? If so I suspect the errors were introduced when joining them together/compositing them. Most of the errors with border positioning are only really noticeable when you take the map and compare it with a map of the whole kingdom – when taken individually they (mostly) look about right but when you look at the "corners" where they join they don't quite line up properly.

This sort of thing is quite difficult to explain in words, but if, for example, you look at the point where Vas and Sopron meet Lower Austria, you can see that on your map Sopron extends to the north-north-west relative to Vas, whereas the Lower Austrian border there should be an essentially continuous arc (compare your border with the one on this sheet of the 1884 A Magyar Állam közigazgatási térképe), with the Vas-Sopron border simply running up to it; there should be no "step" there. To put it another way, if we assume that Vas and Moson are both accurate relative to Lower Austria, the Sopron-Lower Austria Border is about 10px too far north and about 6px too far west (although it isn't quite as linear as that).

For the Komárom region, if you take the borders of Győr with Sopron, Moson and Pozsony as accurate, and the borders of Komárom with Esztergom and Bars as accurate, then the rest of Komárom's borders (with Nytra, Pozsony, Győr, Veszprém and Fejér) are about 6px too far south and 6px too far east; the border between Győr and Veszprém then needs to be rotated/twisted so it meets Komárom in the right place. The Fejér/Veszprem border also needs to move north-west at the top, but at the bottom needs to move about 6px south (as does the Fejér/Tolna border and the Sió between the tripoint and the Danube).

For Syrmia (Szerém) etc, if you take the eastern border of Syrmia with Torontál and the northern borders of Bács-Bodrog and Baranya as correct, the eastern part of the border with Bács-Bodrog is also roughly correct, but the western half is shifted north from around Ilok, as are the borders of Bács-Bodrog/Baranya/Verőcze/Pozsega, both internal and external (as are the rivers). In the south of Syrmia/Pozsega the border (with Serbia and Bosnia) is at its eastern end about 22px too far north and 10px too far west, but is roughly right by around the southernmost point of Pozsega.

These descriptions are relative though – without a projection to compare things to in absolute terms its difficult to say what is "correct" and what is wrong. (Is it Komárom's borders with Nytra, Pozsony, Győr, Veszprém and Fejér that are wrong, or is it Győr's with Sopron, Moson and Pozsony and Komárom's with Esztergom and Bars? Are they both wrong in different ways?)

I could go on but I don't really think it's possible to be exhaustive, and without seeing your original source file it is difficult to give specific advice. (I'm also not familiar with GIMP so couldn't really be that specific even if I did have it in front of me.)

Sources-wise I mostly use manually vectorised data from various survey maps (e.g. the Austro-Hungarian 3rd Military Mapping Survey), which I then reproject, scale down and simplify. It is not something I would recommend unless you need very detailed maps though as it is very time consuming to actually do.

There is no need to apologise for the pseudo-SVG – mistakes happen. The advantages of SVGs aren't just scalability but also ease of translation, editing, reuse and often file size (although most of those don't apply much to this file in particular, especially as you haven't used any kind of anti-aliasing on your borders and text). If you're interested I would definitely suggest giving Inkscape a go as the barrier to entry is pretty low and once you get used to how it works the skills are mostly the same as for raster graphics.

As for a more detailed SVG, I am working on one at the moment – I only have Transylvania and a few of the other counties left to do.

Alphathon /ˈæɫfə.θɒn/ ^(talk) 17:45, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to write all of this out. I have been working on a map project of my own, transcribing the borders of Europe in 1914, 1922, and 1939 (sourced primarily via Arcanum Maps and the UN Archives for the Treaty of Versailles) into Google Earth as path files, as well as making placemark folders showing the old German names of settlements east of the Oder-Neiße Line. It's been very time consuming, but I have learned a great deal from it and I hope it will be a valued resource when it is complete, if I can figure out how to share it.

In order to create the Kingdom of Hungary map, there were two steps. In my efforts to map the subdivisions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I decided I had to map the borders of the counties of the Kingdom of Hungary. At the same time I also took the census records from 1910 and made a table out of them for use in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Kingdom_of_Hungary_by_county

First, I took most of the county maps found on Wikipedia and overlaid those images onto Google Earth to their proper locations generally by lining up cities. There are no doubt some errors, but 98% of the time, I am confident in them being accurate within a hundred yards. I'd share a screenshot of how it looks but it seems that the copyright policy of Wikimedia does not allow that. Second, I saved the image at a high resolution on Google Earth and overlaid it, matching the edges, with this map showing the linguistic situation of the Kingdom of Hungary with towns, but not counties:

Map uploaded by AJGloe to Reddit 4 years ago, sourced via the now-defunct website "omm1910.hu"

From there I was able to determine the precise shape of the county boundaries by seeing which towns abutted county borders. So, any errors in the map are either errors of my own while mapping the counties in Google Earth, or errors of the map with the town divisions. Here is the map with the town borders depicted in gray and the county borders shown in solid black:

Ethnic Map of Hungary 1910 with Counties and Towns according the 1910 Census

I am sure you will be interested in taking a look at that version with its greater level of detail. Good to hear that you have been developing an SVG of your own for the Hungarian counties, I look forward to seeing it. And I will see about watching some Inkscape tutorial videos at some point.

Ascended Dreamer (talk) 02:11, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Arcanum really is an excellent resource; I have used it many times before.

It would seem the distortions originate with AJGloe's map. You can see the discrepancies if you compare that map to the cadastral maps on Arcanum. The area zoomed to in the link shows the Vas/Sopron/Lower Austria tripont I mentioned before. If you compare Hochstraß between the two maps you can see that on AJGloe's map it is very vertically distorted for whatever reason (it's about twice as tall as it should be), and the other cadastres are as a result offset. Steinbach in Vas and the two which were Karl in 1856 in Sopron (the third military survey seems to confirm that that cadastre was split into two at some point before 1887) should be lined up next to each other but barely even touch.

You can also see that Igar, the Fejér panhandle, should line up with Szilasbalhás along their southern borders but for whatever reason they don't on AJGloe's map.

Unfortunately Arcanum only seems to have any cadastral maps from what is now Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary, as well as Carpathian Ruthenia in Ukraine and some Romanian parts of Máramaros, so other areas are more difficult to compare (e.g. almost all of Bács-Bodrog and Syrmia are missing). They are marked on the third military survey but are much harder to use. I just did a quick check on the "point" of Syrmia, and it would seem there the issue is that Semlin is squashed.

By the way, I think I've noticed some other (mostly fairly small) errors (that aren't just border positioning):

• For the border between Szablocs and Bereg you seem to have just followed the Tisza/Theiss. As far as I can tell this was correct at some points in history but at least by the 1870s Vásráros-Namény in the south had become part of Bereg (formerly part of Szatmár I think) and Eszeny, Szalóka and Tiszaágtelek in the north had become part of Szablocs. (See Bereg county administrative map and this sheet).
• There also seem to be some minor errors on:
  • the Borsod/Gömör-és-Kis-Hont border (where it meets Abaúj-Torna)
  • Nórád/Hont – Nagycsalomja should belong to Hont
  • Baranya/Somogy – Kertseliet should belong to Baranya
  • Baranya/Tolna – Máza should belong to Tolna, Zsibrik to Baranya
  • Baranya/Bács-Bodrog – Kiskőszeg/Batina should belong to Baranya
  • Tolna/Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun – you seem to have erroneously given Ordas to Tolna and misplaced the Danube
  • maybe the Sáros/Zemplén and Bars/Nyitra borders
  • the little panhandle in the far south of Zala (Legrad) doesn't appear to reach far enough (AJGloe's fault) and the Drava there is misplaced
  • I think the little panhandle of Szatmár around Nyírvasvári should extend further south (AJGloe's fault)
  • I am uncertain about the panhandle at the base of Torontál as it only appears on some maps

With regard to your Google Earth project, I think you should be able to export the paths in a format (maybe KML or something) that can then be imported into some GIS software such as QGIS or ArcGIS, which can then export them as raster images or SVGs. Be wary of copyright though, as the Google Maps data itself is copyrighted (I think you should be OK with your own paths as long as they don't use parts of Google's data).

If you are so inclined you might be able to add it to OpenHistoricalMap, which is fairly incomplete.

Alphathon /ˈæɫfə.θɒn/ ^(talk) 13:28, 22 July 2023 (UTC)