Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Earth Viewed From Books

This is way cool! A developer at Google has created a map of the Earth viewed from books, which shows how often a location is mentioned in the books in Google Book Search.
We've all seen views of the Earth from space, where the numerous pinpoints of light on the ground combine to yield a speckled map of the world. I wanted to show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations in books combine to yield another interpretation of the globe. The intensity of each pixel is proportional to the number of times the location at a given set of coordinates is mentioned across all of the books in Google Books Search.

How cool is that?!

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