Here’s something kind of cool: A new Google Map of American student activism in the 2009-10 academic year.

(The red markers are building occupations, the blue ones are demonstrations, the green ones are strikes, and the yellow ones are other newsworthy stories. A black dot means that one or more students were arrested in connection with the event.)

I’ve still got a lot to do to flesh it out, both in terms of adding more sites of activism and bulking up the information I include on the ones that are already there. I want to plug in links to websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds for as many of the actions as I can, for instance. But it’s well underway, and adding new material will go quicker if y’all are giving me the benefit of your knowledge.

Please feel free to make suggestions for new “pins” or other new info either in comments here or over at Google, and I’ll input what you give me as quickly as I can.

My inspiration for this map, by the way, came from this German map of student occupations. I figured I’d do my own since I wanted to recognize a broader spectrum of actions than they do (and, well, because theirs is in German), but that map is an excellent one with a global reach.

December 1 Update | The Nation has put up a very welcome online article about the map. If you’re interested in more detail about what I’m up to and why, that’s the place to go.

December 4 Update | There are now more than thirty pins in the map, in more than a dozen states, each with a link to media coverage of the event in question. Four of the incidents noted took place after I created the map earlier this week, and there are more updates coming this weekend.

December 8 Update | Closing in on fifty pins, including the new Wheeler Hall occupation at Berkeley and the CSU Stanislaus demonstration from Saturday. The Google Maps interface is annoyingly clunky and slow, but I’m adding new stuff pretty much every day.

January Update | I’m putting up a revised version of the map every Monday now, with a blogpost overview of what’s been added in the previous week. Check the main site on Mondays for new installments.