Middle Earth on Google Maps

Middle Earth Map is an interactive map of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This one doesn't use the Google Maps API but the map is beautifully designed and it includes a nifty little feature to change the map labels from English to Elvish.


If your Spanish is better than your Elvish then you might want to check out La Tierra Media. This Google Map of Middle Earth includes a sidebar with links to zoom and pan the map to locations in Middle-Earth on the map (in Spanish).


If your English is better than your Spanish and Elvish then you need the Lord of the Rings - Middle Earth Map. This map also includes handy sidebar links to find locations on the map.


The Interactive Map of Middle Earth uses the Google Maps API to create a simple interactive map of Middle Earth. There aren't any map markers or guides to the locations on the map but you can pan the map around to explore Tolkein's fantasy world.

And Finally -you can always use Google Maps walking directions to get directions to Mordor, although do remember that One Does not Simply Walk into Mordor.

Finding Poems by Location

The Representative Poetry Online (RPO) from the University of Toronto Libraries has created a Google Map called Places of Poems & Poets.

The map allows users to search for places mentioned in the RPO poetry collection. Users can also search for poets' birth places, death places and residences.

The information window for each poem contains a link that you can click through to read the poem about a location.


The poet Robert Frost said that "All literature begins with geography". Poetry Atlas agrees 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 Map 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.

I Just Became the Mayor of Hogwarts

Readmap has a new twist on the check-in format. Now instead of checking-in with Foursquare or Google Latitude you can check-in when your read.

Users of the Readmill app for iPad can choose to track where they read by enabling location tracking in the app. Readmap can then visualise your Readmill check-ins and show where you have been reading books using Google Maps.

To create a Readmap of your reading locations you need sync the map to a Readmill account.

Novel Mapping Projects - Chapter One

Many authors seem to have a special relationship with particular places. Some cities seem to have become almost inextricably linked with certain author's bodies of work, whether it be Charles Dickens' London or James Joyce's Dublin.

Novels: On Location is a good place to start if you want to find a book set in a specific location. In fact this Google Map acts a great guide for travellers keen to read a novel set in the places visited.

Using the map you can search for a location and find novels that are set there. For example, if you are lucky enough to be able to visit St Petersburg (or you just want to read something set there) you can consult Novels: On Location which recommends you read Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment.

Also See

• Joyce Walks - maps of walks with connections to Joyce's Ulysses
• Ballard Geocoded - a Google Map of the locations in the works of JG Ballard
• The Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project - a map of locations in the works of Patrick O'Brian, author of the popular Master and Commander
• Londonist Sherlock Holmes Map - mapping the locations in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels
• Litmap - locations in The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage by W.G. Sebald
• Poetry Atlas - Google Map of geo-tagged poems
• Google Lit Trips - Many, many literary journeys mapped

Google Maps Based Stories

• The 21 Steps - by Charles Cumming is "an adrenaline-fuelled adventure written and designed for Google Maps"
• Senghor on the Rocks - a German language novel with Google Maps

Find Texts About Places with Google Maps

The Online Computer Library Center has created a Google Map that allows researchers to find information about a location held in Open WorldCat or Google Books. mapFast allows users to select a location and then returns links to texts about the selected location in the WorldCat, the world's largest bibliographic database, or on Google Books.

When users search for a location they can also define a search radius. The map then centers on the requested location and also displays other referenced locations within the selected search area. This helps researchers to discover texts on surrounding locations as well as for the primary search term.

Texts of the Ancient World on Google Maps

GapVis is an interface for exploring the locations referenced in historical texts. The project aims to geo-tag and show the locations of ancient places mentioned in some of the key books from and about the ancient world.

Currently the interface allows you to explore texts such as Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herodotus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, The First and Thirty-third Books of Pliny's Natural History and a number of other texts.

GapVis comes with a number of different views. The Book Summary view includes a Google Map displaying all the places referenced in a book and where they appear in the narrative structure. The Place Detail view provides deeper information about a particular geographic location, including a network map of related places based on narrative co-reference.

The Poetry of Google Maps

The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) is using Google Maps to encourage geo-tagged poetry. Poetry 4 U allowed users to submit short poems (140 characters or less) about places in Melbourne and attach them to a Google Map.

The submitted poems can be viewed on the Poetry 4 U Google Maps. Currently the site has two maps, the Swanston Street poetry map and the New poetry location map (for poems based around the Melbourne city circle tram route).



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". Poetry Atlas believes that this is true and also believes that nearly everywhere on Earth, at some point, has had a poem written about it.

The Poetry Atlas has therefore created a Google Map 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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Find a Book by Location with Google Maps

Pinbooks is a German language search engine and community for books with stories set in a particular place and/or at a certain time.

The pinbooks home page features a prominent Google Map which animates through the latest geotagged ("pinned") books by the community's members. It is also possible to search the map to find books that are associated with a particular location.

Users of pinbook can use the social features of the site to build friendships within the pinbook community and they can share their actions on pinbooks with their Facebook friends.

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J.G. Ballard on Google Maps

One of the recurring themes in the novels of J. G. Ballard is the psychological effects of the environment on individuals. His novels, from the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun to Super-Cannes and Hello America, were also set in many locations throughout the world.

Ballard Geocoded is a Google Map of the locations in J.G. Ballard's fiction. If you click on a map marker you can read a short extract that mentions the location and find out the novel in which it is mentioned.

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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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Around the World in 80 Seconds

Around the World in 80 Seconds


After dinner at the Reform Club yesterday I took a seat in the reading-room beside the open fire. I was soon joined by my usual five whist partners.

It was during the ensuing conversation that I somehow found myself betting twenty thousand pounds that it was possible to travel around the world in 80 seconds using the newly opened Google Earth browser plug-in.

What follows is my attempts to circumnavigate the globe in less than 80 seconds ...

Other Book Related Maps

• Senghor on the Rocks - a full length novel told through Google Maps
• Joyce Walks - remaps routes from James Joyce's Ulysses to any other city
• The 21 Steps an adrenaline-fuelled adventure written and designed for Google Maps.
• Littourati Blog - Mapping places in books
• Google Lit Trips - Many, many literary journeys mapped.
  

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