Google Book Search has begun to animate the information found in books by organizing the locations mentioned in them on Google Maps. Complemented by snippets of text from the book, Book Search links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. For example, in David Foster Wallace's excellent Girl With Curious Hair you can see that he seems to have fondness for the South and the East coast. Obviously, if you wanted to arrange a road trip to coincide with a favorite book, this would be an excellent way to do it. Travel tip: consider Around the World in 80 Days.

Matthew Gray is a software engineer for Google, and he recently developed a nifty little mash-up, showing the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations in books combine to yield an 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 the books in Book Search. If you wanted to plan a trip off the beaten path -- or, in this case, off the typed word -- just check out the map below. The lighter the map, the fewer words have been written about the place.

[Via GoogleMapsMania and The Map Room]

Filed under: Blogs, Books