Starting with "Head northwest on West 47th Street toward 7th Ave," the Berlin artist Gregor Weichbrodt has translated Jack Kerouac's On the Road into Google Maps directions. The entire route totals 17,527 miles, for those who want to follow along in Street View.

Stephanie Posavec's infographic literary maps have been catching a lot of attention, but let's take a closer look. As NotCot explains, the map represents Jack Kerouac's classic beat novel On the Road, "exhibit[ing] scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighing and noting sentence length, prosody, and themes..." But... why?! They look pretty, yet are completely useless, and only notable as an exercise in obsession. Without the explanation, the abstract images might be artistic ad graphics. We're reminded of a word coined by infographics master Edward Tufte: "chartjunk: useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of quantitative information displays." The artist's explanation of how the map was compiled follows.