July 24, 2026 by languagehat

PlotLines is a terrific site: “The classics, mapped – every journey in the book, drawn on a hand-tinted period map, with the real 1890s Ordnance Survey wherever the story walks in Britain.” For anyone who, like me, reads novels with maps and atlas at hand, trying to trace the characters’ travels, it’s a godsend, and it’s brilliantly done — check out the way it traces Leopold and Stephen’s crisscrossing paths in Ulysses. It’s got dozens of novels, including War and Peace, which must have been quite a challenge (a minor annoyance: the text talks about Austerlitz, but the map shows Slavkov, with no explanation that that’s the modern name), with “more to come.” It was created by Chris Moran (under the pseudonym Peter Guillam, a character from John le Carré), and you can read about how he did it, using the Claude desktop app, here.

Not gonna make a separate post, because how many people are interested in Proto-Elamite, but in case you are, Kate Kelley’s Proto-Elamite: Writing and Society in Early Iran has been published as a New Cambridge Element (whatever that may be), and it’s available for free for the next couple of weeks. (Via Nelson Goering’s FB post.)