Disordered Cogitations

Don't you just hate it, when you are at the beach reading Thucydides's (460-400 BC) History of the Peloponnesian War, and you run across a sentence like you find in chapter 8:

The next summer the Peloponnesians and their allies, instead of invading Attica, marched against Plataea, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians.

and you wonder, just where the heck is Plataea? I thought so. Well, lucky for you the good folks at Metacarta have begun geo-parsing classic works out of the Project Gutenberg. So if you read these books at the Gutenkarte site, you can just mouse over the location name and see on a map where the place is, like this. Very cool.

I am waiting for someone to write a SciFi novel set in Second Life and have a Gutenkarte like mashup running inside the book. Won't the future be great?

(Thanks to the IT Conversations podcast for alerting me to the the Gutenkarte site.)

Labels: gutenberg, mashup, metacarta, peloponnesian war, thucydides