Over on the Inside Google Books blog, Mathew Grey, a software engineer at Google, has created a time series of maps of the earth based on the number of times a location was mentioned in books from Google Books Search. Grey expanded on a project, originally created by David Petrou that extracted locations mentioned in books and assigned coordinates to them.  Grey compiled all the locations to create a map of the entire earth, with the intensity of the pixel representing the number of times that particular location has been mentioned.  The data is further broken down in thirty year increments for the 19th century for an interesting comparison of global literature over time. (Seen via Catholicgauze)

Read more: Earth viewed from books