[OC] I made a typographic map of Norway using the names of its towns and localities

17 comments

1. Heisann! Thanks for checking out my project. Here’s a little more context on what you’re seeing:

   – This is a piece of **Data Art**, not a traditional atlas. The goal is to let the data itself create the art, rather than to show every single town.

   – A custom algorithm I wrote places each name from the OpenStreetMap dataset at its exact coordinates, starting with the most populous cities. The main rule is that **names cannot overlap**. So in dense areas, a larger town can block its smaller neighbors, which is why **some well-known places might be missing**.

   – Also, since the data is from the community-driven OSM, you **might spot some historical places** that are now ghost towns or have been absorbed into other cities.

   I hope you enjoy the result and I’m happy to answer any questions.

2. Very nice!

3. Cool consept, but why have some bigger cities been absorbed by smaller ones?

4. This is pretty cool, i like it!

5. Du har Bø i telemark to steder.

6. I mean, this is your project, and I completely buy that certain bigger towns eat up smaller ones, but you have several small towns eating up bigger towns as well.

7. Skipping everything on Senja and just putting “husøya” is criminal behaviour.

   Other than that, this is pretty cool

8. Cool, but I’m somewhat puzzled by some of the choices. Some of them are minor parts of bigger villages/towns

9. Where’s is Trøndelags 2nd biggest town, Stjørdal?

10. Hamna i Ryggefjord should just be Ryggefjord, It “Hamna i” means “Pier in” 🙂

11. Aurlandsvangen is the name of a place in Aurland.

12. I can’t see Drangedal 😭

13. North of Mo i Rana you have printed Nordre Stormdalen. This is very strange as that is a farm where nobody has lived since 1905. It is now a (very beautiful) cabin. Right east of it is the small village Storvoll, which you could have used instead.

14. Its very cool! But i wondered – what would you do with cities that are wrongly placed? I.e. Skien is placed north of Larvik, when that is not what it is in real life.

15. It would look even better in an appropriate projection

16. Vera in Trøndelag has a population of like 50. I wonder if there are any smaller “cities” on the map.

    EDIT: Maybe Gjevsjøen. I can’t find numbers, but if I’d to guess it’s somewhere between 10 and 30.

17. I’ve seen the same in an icelandic souvenir shop for Iceland many years ago. I wonder if they did it manually

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