Books of the world 📚🌍

About

In the project I aim to build a geo-map of the birth place of literary authors that I have read.

Rationale

Literature provides an almost unique opportunity to vicariously experience other places and cultures. I therefore try to be as diverse in my reading as possible, actively seeking out new authors and works in contexts I have not previously read. In this bid to read literature from all over the world, I want to develop a tool to help me better visualise what countries and regions I have previously read and which are still lacking.

How

This project will aim to combine my personal reading history data from Goodreads, with each author's nationality and/or place of birth, to generate an interactive visual map where I can explore this.

I plan to build this tool in R, primarily as a learning opportunity to develop my usage of this language. And the final visualisation will likely form either an Rmarkdown document or a dashboard.

Overview

The broad procedural outline is as follows:

• Extract reading history through personal Goodreads profile (either through CSV export, or the API; TBC). This will include each book's title, original publication data, author's name, etc.
• Scrape birth place and/or nationality of author's by passing author name list to online searches (e.g. Wikipedia or sites like author and book info.com).
• Geocode location name into latitude and longitude .
• Create global map with pin points at each author's place of birth. When hovering at each pin point, it should list authors name, the number of books of theirs I have read and titles of said books. Will likely add a feature to colour countries where at I've read at least one work of literature.

Expansion

Possible areas to expand on, given time are:

• Adding images for each author for displaying when hovering above pins.
• Some aggregated metrics - number of books and authors I've read per continent, for example.
• Use Goodreads API feature so that map can be generated for any goodreads user profile. Might be a streth depending on the level of manual cleaning/additions needed at the stage of getting author's nationality from the web.
• Filtering options by year/decade/century of publication.
• Generate list of read and unread places.