Matthew Gray, Google engineer, created an interesting task for himself using data from the mother ship’s controversial book scanning project (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.
I have some questions about the validity of the data in the Google database, but the resulting maps are a pretty interesting angle on the locales that authors have written about over time, and how that data overlays larger socio-political events. Gray agrees:
Naturally, this yields some biases towards cities, but it’s still interesting. And there’s a lot of additional analysis that’s fun to do. Filtering the map by publication date, you can see global patterns like the growth and westward expansion of the United States in the 19th century.
