JOE POLLARD

This page is mostly for Beth, who reads a lot.

Among some of my close friends, we had a conversation recently on how many books from around the world we had each read. Naturally this lead to talking about how long it would take to read at least one book written by someone from every country in the world and what would be the best way to measure and visualise this.

I, of course, viewed this an opportunity to mess around with a spreadsheet.

Thankfully my friends are prolific users of Goodreads which provided me with a very straightforward way of retrieving a list of books read. Less straightforward was filling in the birthplace and nationality of each which, given my lack of access to a centralised database of authors, meant manually filling in all the entries. Once collated, I imported the data to Infogram and used their world map template to display the data. 

 

Using birthplace as a proxy for cultural representation is far from perfect and nationality as a label has its problems as well. Indeed not every nationality or minority group can be represented on a world map. However it would be presumptuous of me to judge which author should represent which group or culture, and nationality will at least broadly point out any blindspots which suits the overall aim of the infographic well.

 

So here we have a map representing the number of books Beth has read by the nationality of the author. Unfortunately she reads quicker than I can update the map so the next step in this ongoing project will be to figure out a method of automation.