37,500 border drawings: a map of the world as people remember it

What The Drawn World shows

habibicode.org has published a world map built entirely from hand-drawn borders. The project is called The Drawn World, and it collects every line people have drawn in Borderline, a browser game in which a country appears with its borders erased and the player has to draw its land borders or its coastline from memory. According to the author, Nicolas, each drawing is stored anonymously and laid over all the others.

The counter on the page read 52,714 drawings and 184 countries while this article was being written. When the project was posted, the same counter showed about 37,500 drawings, so the map is still filling in live.

How the map forms

The weight of a line depends on two things: how accurate a drawing is, and how many people drew the same line. Accurate guesses render sharper, while lines drawn by many people turn dark. Nothing is dropped for being a bad guess, so vague memories spread out into faint clouds and the places people agree on sharpen into a single outline. The whole map is stored on a 4096x2048 grid.

What the numbers say

Brazil has the most drawings (768), followed by China (760) and Chile (730). By median error, Botswana is the country people draw most accurately, with a median deviation of 3.3 kilometres; the Democratic Republic of the Congo (218.1 km) and Canada (203.8 km) are the hardest. Georgia has 342 drawings and a median error of 31.7 kilometres. Coastline rounds behave differently: Indonesia has 442 coastline drawings and no land-border rounds at all.

The Drawn World is part of a family of maps: France (5,584 drawings), the United States (2,291), Switzerland (634), Germany (613), the United Kingdom (392) and Australia (278) each have their own page.