Mapping Traditional Culture



Culture is a living organism, constantly evolving. Millenials might be surprised that this has been the case for eons and every era had it's own dubsteps and traps, or Reebooks and Under Armours. Language, music, songs, costumes, customs, dances, crafts or local names always had strong regional character. To describe an Easter willow tree rod, some say “pomlázka”, some say “žíla”. To describe a girl, some say “koc”, some say “borka”. Some regions wore high hats with a buckle, some wore low hats with cock feather. There is a plethora of more or less saturated cultural differences even in such a small country as the Czech Republic.

Studying such cultural differences is one of the main focuses of The National Institute for Traditional Culture which conducts both regional and local researches. Its results have been piling up in hundreds of questionnaires. Those were nothing short of extensive sets of questions and answers locked in text. The idea to place these results on the map was pretty obvious.

The Map of Traditional Customs does not serve as a single source that contains all the information. It was rather created as an universal tool for producing countless of separate maps with various topics that reflect different researches. The application and its custom-built backend was created specifically so it is ready to present research results of various sizes, focus and topics. It helps the institute with making sense of tedious data from different sources and painting a bigger picture of geographical distribution of certain cultural topics.

Backend and frontend by Zdenek.