The Map of GitHub

Every now and again I search GitHub for map and IIIF projects. I find that a quick search of GitHub repositories is a handy way to get an overview of new (and old) areas that the developer community is currently working on. 

My searching of GitHub has now become a lot easier thanks to the Map of GitHub. The Map of GitHub is a network graph of over 400,000 GitHub projects. Each dot on this interactive map is a Github project, mapped based on the number of 'common stargazers'.

This map of GitHub projects is made based on GitHub users use of stars to save or like a repository. In simple terms it connects two different repositories based on the number of users who have starred both repositories. In more detailed terms it organizes a database of 350 million stars awarded to repositories between 2020 and the end of March 2023 using a Jaccard Similarity algorithm. 

When zoomed out on the map all the repositories are organized into 'countries'. The names for each "country" were hand-picked by the map's creator, Andrei Kashcha, with a little help from ChatGPT. As you zoom in on the map more 'region' labels will appear on the map. For example you can find 'Maplands' if you zoom in on 'AILandia' in the top-right corner of the map. 

If you right-click on a country or region label you can choose to view the largest projects in that area. For example the largest GitHub repositories in Mapland include Mapbox, turf.js and deck.gl (presumably size is determined here by the number of stars given to a repository). If you click on the name of an individual repository lines appear on the map showing the starred connections between the different repositories. Information about the selected project is also displayed in the map sidebar.

If you like the Maps of Github then you might also like Andrei's Map of Reddit, an interactive map which organizes and plots subreddits based on their similarity.