Africamap Overview

Africamap has certainly shaped my conception of the African continent since it is my first real exposure to issues in Africa.  I think that the geographically based approach that Africamap takes in terms of organizing data is particularly helpful since it allows you to immediately situate things in space and time.  I think that the tool is useful though not incredibly accessible, since it requires the user to a) have some previous guidance in terms of figuring out how it works, and b) know something about the issue they’re interested in studying to really make full use of the resource.  In my opinion, it serves more as a tool to reaffirm or discover new aspects about issues that one is already researching than as an entry point to research.  In this sense, I found Africamap increasingly more useful as the semester went along.  As you begin to narrow your field of focus, it becomes much easier to understand what you're looking for and how to use Africamap to find it.  One aspect of Africamap that I found really cool was how you can have different feeds from websites such as Picasa or Youtube.  This injects your research with an interesting multimedia approach that academic work sometimes lack.  The idea that you can use media sharing websites in scholarly work is a relatively new one, but is certainly fruitful and can lead to many interesting insights.