Gutenkarte : Geolocating Project Gutenberg Texts

Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature derived from the Gutenburg projects. Project Gutenberg claims to be the first and largest single collection of free electronic books (eBooks).

“Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta’s GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map. Ultimately, Gutenkarte will offer the ability to annotate and correct the places in the database, so that the community will be able construct and share rich geographic views of Project Gutenberg’s enormous body of literary classics.”

Gutenkarte was developed by MetaCarta - well known for its unique technology that combines traditional text (keyword) search with powerful geographic search so you can find content about a place and view the results on a map. You can read more about O’Reilly Radar article on Gutenkarte and its Geo annotation of Gutenberg texts. You can always volunteer to proofread Project Gutenberg Ebooks.