Books set in your destination

[Tina]

That is how to find a fiction book set in the location you are planning to visit....
I've been running through blogs and websites mentioning 'books set in Italy' and discovered a couple of sites others might find useful.
The most comprehensive is https://www.mappit.net/bookmap/ You can also add books which aren't included already by filling in a form.
Another is https://visitthisreadthat.com/

 

[joe]

The most comprehensive is https://www.mappit.net/bookmap/ You can also add books which aren't included already by filling in a form.

As one who loves seeing info on maps, this is a great idea : books pinpointed to certain places or regions on a map. There is also a "table view", if you prefer just to go through a list of books, according to the same criteria. A tip of the hat to the programmer (Alex Mackie).
However, and without having any knowledge myself how data like this is extracted and implemented, I'd have to add that the site is still lacking, even with respect to rather famous writers/books. Good thing that readers can add to the list, but I would have expected that data mining would be able to do a more comprehensive job. I suppose it's not that easy. Maybe in order to be more comprehensive, the entire contents of books have to be accessible for scanning/mining - something that apparently is not going to happen (although reviews of books can probably be "mined", and thus used for the purpose of determining location).
Examples of odd omissions (at least as far as I can tell going through some of the lists, and only concerning Italy) :
The Eight Mountains, by Paolo Cognetti
books by Beppe Fegnolio
books about Gino Bartali

 

[Andrew]

Interesting sites, and I'll point out my retired occupation of catalog(u)ing librarian, where subject headings for fiction became common relatively recently and there's a debate about whether they're useful, and how much people go by controlled vocabulary instead of Google-like keyword searches.

At the Library of Congress Catalog, one can do Browse > Subjects beginning with > and enter something like Turin (Italy) --Fiction, and it would be a question how useful the results list is to what one's seeking. For Cognetti's Eight Mountains, the English edition in LC's catalog doesn't have subjects; the Italian has Dolomite Alps (Italy)--Fiction, and how often would that be the geographic term people would know to search? Although if you go to the proper type of search, you can get a cross-reference. Even though Fenoglio has a short story collection with Alba in the title, it doesn't show as a subject. His work known to me, Una questione privata or A Private Affair includes the subject Italy--History--Allied occupation, 1943-1947--Fiction. Again, how to know that a subject is phrased that way?

That's for books cataloged by the Library of Congress. For a bigger set of libraries there's www.worldcat.org , which mostly leads to keyword searches, and you can get video materials listed as well.

 

[joe]

Continued to check this out, and was pleasantly surprised to read that my guess that reviews were used to help determine locations of books was right. But this also wasn't optimal, so other methods were also needed. It seems that a significant part of the database is now contributed by users. And indeed this is not an easy project for data-mining.

Once upon a somewhere: the challenges of putting books on the map by Alex Mackie - Where Geospatial Media - Blog

FOR HIS GIS MASTERS DISSERTATION at the University of Edinburgh, Alex Mackie chose to mix two subjects close to his heart: books and maps. There is undoubtedly commercial value to mapping books but this has been largely ignored by the industry. If books are properly georeferenced then...

blog.wheregeospatial.com

 

[MaisonRose]

That is how to find a fiction book set in the location you are planning to visit....
I've been running through blogs and websites mentioning 'books set in Italy' and discovered a couple of sites others might find useful.
The most comprehensive is https://www.mappit.net/bookmap/ You can also add books which aren't included already by filling in a form.
Another is https://visitthisreadthat.com/

Wow: I added some of my favorites, especially books I’ve loved that take place in Provence. Thanks for the link.