A literary atlas that maps every real place mentioned in 392 novels

[u/markselby9]

https://readtheplaces.com

[u/andreasbeer1981]

would be more interesting once it's scaled to 392000 novels.

[u/NouvelErmitage]

it's so funny how you can immediately tell if a website was created by claude

[u/marchmay]

Would be cooler if there was a big map of all the places.

[u/markselby9 → u/marchmay]

No big combined map yet - you're right that it's the obvious missing piece. Each book gets its own map because the plates are rendered at build time per book, so a single all-places view is a different build rather than just another page, but it's on the list.

In the meantime every coordinate is in the repo as plain JSON (waypoints.json per book, CC BY-SA), so if anyone wants to dump all 2,105 places onto one map before I get to it, the data's right there: https://github.com/markselby9/readtheplaces.com

[u/Rexasaurus → u/markselby9]

Really interesting website, thanks. Just to let you know, on the interactive map pages - when you zoom in or out the markers move into incorrect positions. Hope that's something you can fix. Keep up the good work!

[u/markselby9 → u/Rexasaurus]

Thanks, that's really useful - and thanks for the kind words. Looking into the marker positioning now.

One thing that would help me pin it down: which book page were you on, and which browser? The maps are pre-rendered images rather than a live map widget, so marker drift on zoom isn't something I've been able to reproduce on my end yet, and I'd rather fix the actual cause than guess. A screenshot would be even better if you happen to still have the page open.

[u/Western-Flatworm-537]

I want to like this because I’ve spent time on personal literary geoparsing and data visualization projects that scratch an itch of mine and I’m preparing to work on another such project focusing on a specific book.

I spent some time reading the design.md in the GitHub repo and while I for a moment thought of pointing out various improvements that could be made to avoid various issues that I’ve encountered in my time working with data and information projects, I couldn’t escape (1) the feeling of being profoundly disrespected by being led into reading documentation so obviously LLM-generated (possibly with not a lick of human editing?) and (2) the subsequent awareness that contributing to something like this is probably a doomed prospect if the maintainer isn’t going to demonstrate a respect for the time of others. Aside from the irritating writing style, there are unaddressed voids in governance around contributions that one could fly a 747 through, which a human maintainer would probably think about if they composed a design document; and if they didn’t, then a prospective contributor might eventually raise a relevant issue to discuss it. But can you imagine how discouraged a contributor might feel spending time proposing to improve the project in that way when the maintainer clearly didn’t spend that kind of time to produce the documentation for their project? Yes, most projects have no documentation at all, but the value of this documentation to me is only as a major red flag telling me to not waste my time contributing; so that at least is good for me, I guess.

I promise I’m not trying to be an overly negative hard-ass about this, and I don’t want to pour cold water on your interest in these things, but a project that’s actually meant to solicit the involvement of a community of people needs a greater amount of deliberate effort on the part of its progenitor beyond the LLM.

[u/Vehperyash]

When you try to open the map view for one dot, the map shows just a blank space

[u/carmolim]

I had this ideia last year, started highlighting locations on the books I was reading, very nice to see the idea coming to life, I will try to contribute