For this one, the idea came from watching a Kdrama. I can't remember which one exactly now, but as is typical of Kdramas, there was a scene where two characters bow to each other. It started a train of thought where I started wondering if bowing would read the same way to an outsider as it does to someone who grew up inside the culture. And why stop at bowing? Any gesture really, can have different meanings depending on where you are, who it's directed to, and how that person was socialised.
In Korea and Japan, bowing signals respect, hierarchy, and sometimes apology depending on angle and duration. On the other hand, in most Western contexts, people would probably find it quite theatrical.
That's where it started. Like The Journey of Rice, the format reference was pudding.cool and the result is eight gesture types mapped across countries, including head nods, beckoning, pointing, eye contact, thumbs up, greetings, self-reference, and stop.
The project is built in react and splits into two modes. There's an essay section to build the argument with examples and then the gesture explorer where the reader can select a gesture and explore regional meanings across a map.
The map is pure SVG. The continent paths are hand drawn (which is why they kind of look like blobs) and country positions are calculated from latitude and longitude. Now that we're more conversant with leaflet, we'll probably go back to fix that some day but for now… it adds character.
The research was fun to do, there's a whole academic field dedicated to exactly this. It's called Kinesics and you can start with the references in the footnotes if you're interested.