Monday, January 29, 2007

Where is in this magazine?

The heading is barely grammatical, but it is prompted by a fascinating mashup of Google Book Search and Google Maps. See here for details:

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2007/01/books-mapped.html

I should warn you that some of the links in the Booksearch blog do not always work as required (ie there is no book-specific map), probably for arcane copyright-related reasons. But there are good maps of the places mentioned in War and Peace and Around the World in Eighty Days. At least I was able to get to these with a UK registered IP. No such luck with the 9/11 Commission report or "A Problem from Hell": America and the age of genocide . I leave you to find the Marco Polo trail for yourself. I always thought he made a more northerly route to China than is suggested by this Google mashup. Perhaps that is the way he came back, and he only knew where he was going on the return journey?

So can we look forward to a time when we will be able to see a map of all the places mentioned in a particular issue of a magazine? I have no doubt that it will come to pass. It will also probably be feasible through the web to find out which magazine issues mention a specific place and that too could be quite useful. Give it five years. The web is weaving an extraordinarily rich and suggestive gossamer around all information objects.

No comments: