Seeing the Earth through Books
October 16, 2007
A cool layer that is now available on GoogleEarth allows you to see the books that mention a specific place. Draw close to a city like Chicago and you see a few rings of yellow books surrounding the place name. This layer provides a wonderful visualization of the way we know places through secondary cultural references. Why do some place names leap out at us with a certain mystique? It is because of the associations that have accrued to those names.
This book layer looks promising, but on closer examination it turns out to be not so helpful. Google has apparently linked all place names to their immense stock of GoogleBooks. Whenever the search machine finds the word "Chicago" that book gets aligned with the city name on the map. The problem is that "Chicago" will occur tons of times and it is not so helpful to have every link to Chicago highlighted. Who wants to wade through all those passing mentions? Pressing on the small yellow book icons I came across some medical journals from the 19th century, along with government publications and educational tracts. "Chicago" came up in these publications, but these are hardly canonical references to the city.
What would be useful is an ordered listing of the important texts that helped to construct Chicago as "Chicago".. and something similar for other places. The end result would be a geographically organized list of travel and descriptive books. Thinking in terms of the globe, this would be an immensely interesting project.. allowing for a glimpse at the underpinnings of human awareness of other cultures and peoples.. and for a sense of when and how certain places became aware of each other. It would be a project that could conceivably further the goals of the Hakluyt Society, with its annual publication of travel narratives.
The bugaboo in projects like this GoogleEarth book layer is always selection and organization. Google is addicted to the mechanized word search.. and who can blame them since they have ridden it to the bank! But when it comes to genuinely helpful academic projects, the interest is often sacrificed on the altar of the keyword. For getting to know a state like Wisconsin, instead of looking at GoogleEarth's book layer, it is a far better idea to get to the Wisconsin Historical Society's website, which provides links to explanatory articles and primary texts that explain different "turning points" in the history of the state. I could imagine a more effective spatial layout of these texts, but the actual material is far stronger than what shows up in GoogleEarth's book layer. And since these are key historical texts they are actually worth wading through.
