Exploring the Map of Human Knowledge: Interactive Tools to Discover Books and Authors
In todays world, where the new gold is data, navigating the vast sea of knowledge can feel overwhelming. But with technology changing the landscape of everything, the worlds of books and libraries have not been left behind. Thats why i was so fascinated when i stumbled across maps of books revealing interesting connections between books from different authors, topics, genres and more. Let’s delve into four fascinating platforms that visualize human knowledge in unique and engaging ways: Open Syllabus Galaxy, HathiTrust Digital Map, An Ocean of Books, and TheLibraryMap.
With over 1.1 million texts, each star in the map is a book or article frequently assigned in university courses:
- Connected Clusters: Those that appear together in the same courses are grouped close to each other.
- Colorful Subjects: The color-code is based on its main subject — history, science, literature, you name it. Grey circles are the versatile ones, used across multiple disciplines.
- Size Matters: The bigger the circle, the more syllabi the book appears in. So, those large circles? They’re the all-stars of academic reading lists.
2. HathiTrust Digital Map: After that, come HathiTrust Digital Map, which grants access to 14 million digitized books provided by many libraries all over the world. It is much like Google Maps, only in this case it is for the enormous HathiTrust Library.
3. An Ocean of Books: Sail Through Author Islands. This tool, An Ocean of Books, creates a colorful interactive map for more than 100,000 authors and 145,162 books.
Islands and Cities: Each author is an island, and each of their books is a city on that island. It’s a beautiful, bustling world where literature comes alive.
Big Islands, Busy Authors: Big islands suggest an author enjoys some buzz online. The bigger the island, the louder the chatter and more recognized the author is.
Close Neighbors: Authors, who get a mention together in online publications, can easily explore other neighboring authors that relate to their sphere.
4. TheLibraryMap: Genres Galore Popular Interest
This is TheLibraryMap, an interactive and colourful work of art that sifts for you and organizes more than 100,000 books by genres and readership.
Each book has been tagged with a specific secret colour representing the genre or subject-mystery, romance, sci-fi, and others-called colourful genres; it’s a rainbow of books waiting to be discovered.
As for popularity points, the book point markers vary in sizes according to the number of user reviews that have been posted on them. Marker is large?That’s a crowd-favorite pick which one might want to dig in later on.
