Comments on: Google maps and millions of books http://www.stoa.org/archives/567 Serving news, projects, and links for digital classicists everywhere. Wed, 08 May 2013 16:09:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Christopher Schmidt http://www.stoa.org/archives/567/comment-page-1#comment-48489 Christopher Schmidt Sun, 28 Jan 2007 14:42:55 +0000 http://www.stoa.org/?p=567#comment-48489 Note that Gutenkarte has passage-by-passage mapping context too: open a book, and hit the browse link, and you can get to a page like the first chapter of History of the Pelopenisian War.

There are at least 56 places in the world called Rome — MetaCarta Maps can show you that.

One of the other things that MetaCarta Maps can show you is information about water shortages around the world, which I think is part of what the third part of your “What doesn’t it do” list. Although this is not Gutenkarte, the ability to combine free text search with geographic information is a useful task which MetaCarta does well.

So, although Google may have the largest collection, it’s good to know that there are still improvements to be made, and that there are other tools that provide at least some of the way forward in that regard.

(Disclaimer: MetaCarta is my employer, and I work in MetaCarta Labs, the origin of things like Gutenkarte, MetaCarta Maps, and the MetaCarta Web Services. So I’m obviously a bit biased.)

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