Harvard’s AfricaMap Launches

The online resource was featured this week at a Digital Humanities Fair and described in the Crimson.

Ben Lewis, a senior GIS specialist at Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis (who I know from his days at ATS), did the demos of app which launched two weeks ago. I love the idea of bringing tech to often tech-shy humanities types.

The site is a Google Map-based app “based on the Harvard University Geospatial Infrastructure (HUG) platform, and was developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis to make spatial data on Africa easier for researchers to discover and explore.”

The source code will eventually be made open source which will be valuable as the app is based on SDI ideals and open standards.

AfricaMap aims to augment existing initiatives for globally sharing spatial data and technology such as GSDI (Global Spatial Data Infrastructure). AfricaMap makes use of OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) compliant web services such as WMS (Web Map Service), emerging open standards such as WMS-C (cached WMS), and standards-based metadata formats, to enable AfricaMap data layers to be inserted into existing data infrastructures.

Satire on Geography Knowledge Too Believable

I’m not a regular reader of the Huffington Post but on Monday it ran a satire piece about Americans knowledge of geography. The funniest bit:

“On the whole, these figures should be construed as somewhat disappointing,” Gallup spokesman Keith Ventner said. “Especially the two percent that believed the United States was located on the map’s color-coded inset legend. I think we as a nation likely could have done without seeing that.”

Apparently, many of the commenters thought the article was factual. I bet they didn’t do too well on the really hard quizzes in school that at the beginning had the statement: “Read this entire test before beginning” and failed to do so.

Bruce Joffe: Electoral College has to Go

Bruce Joffe (GIS consultant in California and longtime Directions Magazine contributor) has a Speak Out article in the Baltimore Chronicle.