To start our commission’s #365DaysOfMaps journey, I built a little quirky map that looks at how different cultures mark the “start” of the year — spoiler: January 1 is just one contender among many.

This map isn’t fancy, it isn’t exhaustive, and it’s certainly not going to win any design awards, but it invites us to pause and notice how our sense of time is cultural, historical, and sometimes a little arbitrary. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that even a simple map can spark curiosity.

Day one: done. Only 364 to go… what could possibly go wrong?

Map available here.
Data created with: Perplexity Plus
Map created using: Web Mapper GPT

Original Web Mapper GPT Prompt

Hi there. I would like to make a special map celebrating the New Year.

To do so, I have created a dataset of unique celebrations around the world (by country and US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian provinces).

I have a vision of a mobile-first map that allows people to explore the world on their phone and easily click on a country or state, province, etc. to see information about how people celebrate New Years Day uniquely in a given place.

The map design should be 2026 modern! 🙂 Similar to ChatGPT’s site in font and gray scale or Google Gemini’s site (gemini.google.com). The map is merely a fun conversation starter, a time-waster map to be shared on social media and perhaps chatted about amongst friends.

The dataset I created has an ISO country abbreviation field (two and three digit fields). I would like to join my dataset to the Natural Earth Dataset (medium resolution). I have uploaded that country-level dataset here. (states won’t join, obviously, and that’s okay.

My first question is this: can you join these datasets together based on country ISO abbreviation and export a new combined shapefile?