The lands and battles of Game of Thrones. Mapped!
A Song of Flourish and Ice: mapping and visualizing Game of Thrones data
Back when we first released our Projection Map template, we were most excited about allowing users to make absolutely any map they wanted using Flourish. You can upload any GeoJSON! we said. Make any map you want!
And, much to our delight, people have! They’ve made world maps, country maps, and state maps, maps of tiny city wards, county maps, constituency maps, and school district maps. The one thing no one’s ever made, though, is this map…
Is there any better way to mark the end of the Game of Thrones television series than to use some custom-made geometry of George RR Martin’s fantasy world to prove that our Projection Map template can indeed take any GeoJSON file?
But why stop there? Using data from Chris Albon’s wonderfully detailed dataset of the battles fought during the War of the Five Kings, as well as some extra estimation and guesswork on locations and troop numbers gathered from A Wiki of Fire and Ice, The Game of Thrones Wiki and this incredible Reddit post, I plotted the locations of every major battle fought during the war which takes up most of the first half of the series. (Because why not?)
The best part about all of these maps is that you can use them – in fact, we encourage it. All you have to do to get started is click one of the “Make your own” buttons below my example maps.
But honestly, why stop there?
Maps are fun to make, but avid fans have put together dozens – if not hundreds – of datasets which cover all aspects of the Game of Thrones franchise, including kinds of data which isn’t inherently geographic. Why not dig into some of that data and use Flourish to quickly and easily visualize what you’ve found?
For example, I took a brief look at this dataset of each character and house’s screentime and visualized it using our Bar Chart Race template.
Here are a couple of datasets to get you started:
- The dataset on screen time, both by character and house
- A dataset on character deaths from Erin Pierce and Ben Kahle
- This mindblowing collection of GOT data, put together by Jeffrey Lancaster. Read his Medium post on visualizing the data here.
- The original GeoJSON and shapefiles I used to make my maps
- A Reddit post with a bunch of other places to look
#flourishGOT
Once you’ve made something cool and crazy, we will definitely want to see it, so tweet it to @f_l_o_u_r_i_s_h using #flourishGOT! Have any other ideas for new Flourish templates or features (or which fantasy world I should tackle next)? Get in touch via hello@flourish.studio.
