Africamap and its education value.

There is no doubting the value of Africamap as an educational tool. First off, I think that Africamap's real value comes in its visual presentation of data. I blogged about population settlements in the Cape region in an earlier blog, and here Africamap was incredibly valuable in illustrating the distribution and density of populations throughout the region. While, it may sound simplistic but I really did not realize, until I mapped population by cell, that the Western Cape region of South Africa was so sparsely populated. In terms of from a historic perspective this makes sense because of the fact that colonizers originally settled in fairly focused regions for reasons of trade and protection.  Furthermore, and from an environmental perspective, with the layering tool it is also possible to examine the water channels and rivers in a region. When this was done for the Western Cape region, it became clear that despite the fact that much of the inland region is arid there were still a large number of riverbeds throughout.

I think that the real strength of Africamap comes with the map layering ability that it provides. As a historian I really like the ability to overlay contemporary maps on top of the current map, thus not only gaining insight into what people's understanding and perceptions were of an area in the past but also seeing how the area has changed. I would, however, like to see even more options for historic map overlays because at the moment there are only ten options. I believe that these different historic overlays are of great value because they clearly display the different views and biases of their makers.