I recently noticed that Google Books has a cool new feature where (for some books) it will show you a map of places named in the book. I thought it would be good to test it out on a book about globalization, and so I tried Anna Tsing’s Friction, which we discussed last summer. Sure enough, they have a great map of places mentioned in the book:

On the Google Book page you can click on the red tabs and get a relevant excerpt from the book. I think this is a really nifty feature. One can always look up place names in a book’s index, but it is another thing to see them on a map. The service is still a little rough around the edges (most of the US locations mark publishers listed in the bibliography), but I think it has a lot of potential to turn into a truly useful tool for scholars.