mapping books
- From: Bowerbird@[redacted]
- Subject: mapping books
- Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:42:48 EDT
last month, lars challenged me on an idea he had
about mapping the locations mentioned in a book.
my response is here:
> http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/
> bparchive?year=2006&post=2006-05-31,2
(you'll have to rejoin that link.)
[Moderator: Or, if you can cut and paste long lines from your mail reader:
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2006&post=2006-05-31,2 - JMO]
surprise, surprise, over at the ifbook blog, they've got this item up:
> Gutenkarte is an effort to map books by MetaCarta.
> The website takes text from books in Project Gutenberg,
> searches them for the appearance of place names, and
> plots them on a map of the world using their own GeoParser API,
> creating an astonishing visualization of the world described in a text.
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/06/mapping_books.html
http://gutenkarte.org/
http://metacarta.com/
in a comment i left on that blog item, i discuss some
issues involved with the creation of "a semantic web".
(basically, if it depends on heavy markup, it won't happen, but
an "unstructured data analysis" approach like this could work.)
i also learned just now that google had modified its mac version
of "google earth" so that it would run on my o.s. -- 10.3.9 -- so i
downloaded it and checked it out. it's pretty neat. could be fun.
it's the first time i've ever seen the roof of my apartment building.
linux users might be stoked to know there is a linux version too.
it's a beta, but you linux cats are experimental beings, aren't you?
anyway, since it's bloomsday, i can't help but mention that it would
be nice to have a map of dublin annotated with all the book's sites.
i understand that "bloomsday tours" are quite popular in dublin,
so perhaps someone has already made such a map, manually...
-bowerbird