The Earth Viewed From Books
Via The Next Net, a Google engineer built some cool maps showing how often a given location is mentioned in books index by Google’s 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.
It’s a little unclear what the colours refer to, but I figure red is more popular (as in there are more numerous than green, and green is more popular than blue?
Adriana