18th Century Book Trade on Google Maps

Atlas of the Rhode Island Book Trade

The Rhode Island Historical Society are using Google Maps and the MIT Simile Timeline to map as many members of the Rhode Island book trade in the 18th Century as possible.

The data on the Atlas was derived from dozens of sources, ranging from maps and histories of Rhode Island towns to land records and court documents. If you scroll the timeline above the map then the map will load the relevant markers for that period of the 18th century.

The markers on the map show the location of printers and booksellers. If you click on a marker the information window explains when and where the member of the book trade was active. You can also click a link to access the full record in the database. Each marker also contains a precision rating that helps explain how precisely the marker is located.

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Banned Books on Google Maps

Banned Books Map

This has to be one of the saddest maps I've seen in a while.

This week is Banned Books Week. Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and several other groups, Banned Books Week has been documenting the more than 1,000 books that have been banned at U.S. schools and libraries since it was first launched in 1982.

The map shows the locations of where books have been banned in the United States. Reading the books that have been banned, the ridiculous reasons for their banning and some of the disciplinary action faced by teachers and librarians for simply doing their jobs you can't help but weep for the small minded mentalities of some Americans and the lack of backbone shown by some of those in charge of our libraries and schools.

Sorry - rant over. The map itself is a very simple Google My Map but it works fairly well in showing the geographical distribution of books being banned.

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Guide Books on Google Maps

GuidebookPlus

GuidebookPlus is a Google Maps based index for travel guidebooks.

GuidebookPlus maps the page numbers of all the places in guidebooks, such as those published by Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. For example is you choose 'Lonely Planet: Italy' from the drop down menu and zoom in on Italy you can see the page numbers on the map relating to each location.

GuidebookPlus includes a number of other functions. If you want to buy a guidebook for your travels you can use GuidebookPlus to find which guidebook has the most places described in a certain area.

As well as quickly finding the location of places mentioned in guidebooks you can get the driving directions from one location to another, find accommodation, read Wikipedia articles and show only places of a given type of interest.


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Jack the Twitter Tracked with Google Maps

Jack the Twitter

Beware if you use the micro-blogging service Twitter as you might just be hunted down by Jack the Twitter.

Jack the Twitter is a fictional character written by Marcus Brown. Using messages left by individuals on Twitter Marcus Brown is creating a fictional narrative in which Jack the Twitter appears to be stalking Twitter users through the dark streets of London.

Marcus is weaving a narrative around messages found on Twitter to make it appear that Jack the Twitter is secretly spying on them. Each individual narrative is shown on a Google Map, so that over time the created map will become a large site specific narrative canvas.

This is such an inspired idea, although I might just now stop geo-tagging my Tweets.

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Google Maps - The Bible

About-Jesus.org

About-Jesus.org have created a number of Google Maps mashups related to the life and teachings of Jesus.

Paul's first mission journey
Paul's second mission journey
Paul's third mission journey
Paul's journey to Rome

Map of Jesus's ministry - Shows many of the cities within the land of Israel that are mentioned in the New Testament, or were important during New Testament times, about 2000 years ago.

Map of the cities with the seven churches in Revelation - Shows the seven Turkish cities that have the churches that are referred to in the Bible's book of Revelation.

BibleMap.org

BibleMap.org is a mashup that lets you explore cities, regions, and geographic features that appear in the bible through colour coded links in a reading panel. Click the links and map pins appear annotating the area on the map:

For example, when you choose the Old Testament, book of Exodus, chapter 17, you learn more about the city of Rephidim and what it was significant for with supporting detail after clicking on its name. It will also tell you how many times this name appears in the bible.

This is a great way to take geographic references and put them together with text, creating a mashup on so many levels! The creators of the site have this to say: "..The motivation for developing the site was simple. Create a free Bible atlas which harnesses Google Maps. We hope this site will be a blessing to you and possibly help make the living book of the Bible more alive in your life."

Google My Maps

If you centre Google Maps on Jerusalem and search 'user-created' maps you can find many My Maps that highlight locations with a Christian significance.

The Steps of Jesus in Jerusalem
The Life and Times of Jesus
In the Times of Jesus - locations of 1st century AD cities
In the time of Jesus: Borders

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The Rings of Saturn on Google Maps

Litmap

Litmap is a Google Map that shows the locations in The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage by W.G. Sebald. The map was created by Barbara L Hui in conjunction with writing her dissertation Narrative Networks: Mapping Literature at the Turn of the 21st Century.

Hui argues that in in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald illustrates a spatialised view of history that sees the local as globally defined. Mapping the text therefore helps to create new knowledge about the kind of spatiality that is at work in the text on a narrative level.

The map side panel lists the 'lexia', in which place names are mentioned in the book. These places are then plotted on the map. The narrator's walking tour in The Rings of Saturn is mapped in red on the map. The orange lines on the map denote the trajectory of Joseph Conrad’s life, which is described in Chapter V of The Rings of Saturn.


Other Text's on Google Maps

• Poetry Atlas - Google Map of geo-tagged poems
• Londonist Sherlock Holmes Map
• Pessoa - Lisbon, What the Tourist Should See - Fernando Pessoa 1925 tourist guide for Lisbon, mapped
• The Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project - The Master and Commander novels mapped
• Joyce Walks - remaps routes from James Joyce's Ulysses to any other city
• Google Lit Trips - Many, many literary journeys mapped.

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Authors on Google Maps

Map of Author's Birthplaces

Soren, of Microformats.dk, has produced a Google Maps mashup to show the birthplaces of the authors whose books are on the list of the top 250 books borrowed from UK libraries. The data for the map comes from The Guardian's Data Store.

If you click on a map marker you will find out the birthplace of the author and their number on the list. Of course some authors, for example Danielle Steel, have more than one book on the list.

Soren says he couldn't discover the birthplaces of Julia Gregson, Mark
Mills and Sam Bourne. They have therefore been added to the map in the sea off England.

As this list is from books borrowed from UK libraries it isn't surprising to see that a large number of authors on the list were born in the UK. What is interesting is that most of the authors from the US originate from the east coast. I also find it rather sad that the British don't seem to have an appetite for texts written in other languages or from non-Western cultures. There aren't many authors on this list who weren't born in English speaking countries.

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A Street View Romance

Street View Love Story

There have been a few attempts to create literary narratives with Google Maps, notably The 21 Steps and Senghor on the Rocks.

So far I have been disappointed that no one has used Street View to help tell a story. Therefore today I decided to make my own very short (and admittedly not very good) story that is illustrated with Street View imagery.

The 21 Steps
The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming is described by Penguin as "an adrenaline-fuelled adventure written and designed for Google Maps." The whole story is told via place marks on a Google Map as the reader follows hero Rick Blackwell in a conspiracy that takes him far away from home.

Senghor on the Rocks

Senghor on the Rocks was 'the first full-length novel consistently illustrated with Google Maps'.

Every page of Senghor on the Rocks is accompanied by a corresponding satellite view of the current location in the story. When the location changes in the novel the map animates the route to the new location. To achieve this the developers created their own extensions to the Google Maps API, such as long-distance panning and a moveable and rotatable arrow on the map that indicates specific locations.

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All Literature Begins with Geography

Poetry Atlas


This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

(From Composed Upon Westminster Bridge - William Wordsworth)

The poet Robert Frost said that "All literature begins with geography". The Poetry Atlas believe that this is true and also believe that nearly everywhere on Earth, at some point, has had a poem written about it.

The Poetry Atlas has therefore created a Google Maps mashup to try and geotag as many poems as they can and also find poems for as much of the world as possible. If you know about a poem that isn't on the map you can e-mail it to Poetry Atlas and they will add it to the map.

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Sherlock Holme's London Google Map

Londonist Sherlock Holmes Map

We all know that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221b Baker Street now, thanks to The Londonist, we can follow all of the great detective's known movements on Google Maps.

The Londonist have used Map Channels to plot every London location mentioned in Conan Doyle's famous novels. Having plotted Holmes' movements The Londonist have even undertaken a little detective work of their own.

Unsurprisingly, they find that there is a lot of action around the Baker Street area, interestingly however Holmes never once set foot in nearby Soho. There is also a lot amount of action around Crystal Palace and the "reason is elementary when you know that Conan Doyle lived for a time in South Norwood".

If you want to see some of the locations outside of London you can always check out the handy Google Maps provided on Google Books. For example, this page has a map of a all the locations in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Volume One.


Via: http://twitter.com/vicchi

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The Ultimate Google Maps Guide to Lisbon

Pessoa - Lisbon, What the Tourist Should See

In 1925, Fernando Pessoa, the famous Portuguese poet, wrote a tourist guide about the city of Lisbon, Portugal. Through his guide he hoped to inform the world about the marvels of his favourite city. Philippe Gambette has lovingly created a web version of the guide (with the complete text) that uses the Google Maps API to show all the locations mentioned in the guide.

Phillipe has created versions of the guide with photographs (text with pictures), an interactive book (text with Google Maps links) and a Google Map that shows all the locations mentioned in the guide. The interactive book has hyperlinks for all the locations, that when clicked load a Google Map showing the location. The Google Map version contains links that take the user to the relevant text in the guide.

Phillipe has also blogged about how he created this project which is available in English and in French.

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Master & Commander on Google Maps

The Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project

The Aubrey–Maturin series is a sequence of historical novels by Patrick O'Brian, set during the Napoleonic Wars. The novels tell the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. You might be more aware of the characters from the movie Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe, which was adapted from three of the novels.

The Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project's aim is to accurately map the progress of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin over the course of the 21 novels. Currently 36% of the novels have been mapped.

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Map of Geographical References

Inside Google Books
The Inside Google Books blog has produced a number of interesting maps based on the frequency of locations mentioned in books during different decades in the 19th century.

The maps below show the number of times a location is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search. The maps were created using MapReduce and Bigtable

1800's


1830's


1860's


1890's

As the Inside Google Books blog points out the maps show the growth and westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century.

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