Here’s a list of islands around Wales, pulled from Geonames with some Java jiggery-pokery.
The plan is to keep exploring the geography of this list, with inspiration from Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands.
Wikipedia offers a A Companion Guide to Atlas of Remote Islands, which is an interesting concept in itself. I was constantly looking on Wikipedia when reading through Wolf Hall, if only because my knowledge of English history was so poor. A book often seems closely symbiotic to the author’s diligent research (see Anna Funder on All That I Am). It makes sense that a book becomes a kind of boat in the rising oceans of data. A Wikipedia book is a collection of Wikipedia articles that can be easily saved, rendered electronically in PDF, ZIM or OpenDocument format, or ordered as a printed book. But the idea of a conventional book being the skeleton of such accumulated, formatted data is something else again.
For example, I would like to take the text of 2666, and run it through a geoparser, to gain a sense of both the novel’s sprawl and density. The book then becomes a navigation of meaning through all those points in space.