To make this guide even more useful for the tourist, I've created an interactive version of Lisbon, what the tourist should see, with a Google map, and some photos taken during a lovely week spent in the city, as well as some found on the Wikipedia or Flickr.
I scanned the Livros Horizonte version of the book which I had just brought back from Lisbon, performed optical character recognition with SimpleOcr (not very reliable, but free...), to get the complete text which is now freely available (Pessoa has been dead for more than 70 years) at:
If you have access to the interactive version though, you get much more information. For many places, there is a link to its Wikipedia page, or even its official website (with opening hours, for museums).
This supplementary information, which transforms this text into an interactive book, has not been added directly to the original text. In fact I created a PHP+MySQL+Javascript system to automatically insert in the text this information which is stored in databases. The picture below tries to explain the principle. Besides the text, there are 3 databases: the blue one which stores locations in the text of occurrences of the places, the orange one stores the places, and the purple one stores coordinates. Now let's explain the arrows below. For a given set of coordinates on the map, stored in the purple database, there may be one or many interesting things to see (for example on Praça do Comércio there is also an equestrian statue of King José I). Each of these things to see has a file in the orange database, which gives its name and description, sometimes a photo as well. Note that if you want the website to give you information on places in another language, you just have to translate this database and not the whole site! Finally, to know where all these interesting things appear in the text by Pessoa, the position of the characters where they appear is stored in the blue database. It is then possible that one of them appears at different places in the text, like Praça do Comércio below. If the original text is modified (translated, for example), then this blue database has to be changed too.
To finish the project I still have to complete the orange database (I've currently done more than one third). However you can already access everything added so far, especially the text illustrated with photos here. And of course the Google map, which is the basic element of this mashup (contact-me to get the sources if you have a similar project of interactive book) on a theme by Pessoa.
So you can start planning your one week (or more) trip to Lisbon in good company: the one - at least - of some elements, printed or downloaded, from the site...
This post was originally published in French: Livre interactif : Lisbonne par Pessoa.
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