Nowadays, we have innumerable tools to help digitize and organize whatever bits of data we have. With radically different user interfaces and designs, the purposes for which we use different software varies as well. For instance in Microsoft Word, a clean blank sheet becomes your landscape for data entry that eventually produces a customizable and polished document. In Excel, a spreadsheet laden with cells is where you compile information often useful in tracking finances. For the Harvard-fostered program WorldMap however, the world quite literally becomes your oyster.
Fundamentally, WorldMap differs little from applications like Word and Excel. When dumbed down to its core, WordMap is too just a place to input one’s data so that it’s both digitized and more comprehensive. As opposed to typing up text onto an empty document however, WorldMap grants its users access to Google Maps’ database so their information can be organized spatially.
Upon building their own map, the user finds has vast number of tools with which they can layer, pinpoint, and waypoint a single location, or a number of them. Having the freedom to build your own map is a key feature in WorldMap’s repertoire, but the open source aspects to the program allow it to truly shine. Any map that another user has generated is available for the world to view and interact with. This means that large teams can collaborate on a mapping effort of O.J. Simpson’s infamous police chase or of a piece of literature reliant on geographic context such as James Joyce’s Dubliners for instance. Additionally, WorldMap has a feature called WARP in which a user can overlay any map over a current one. This can be real insightful when comparing methods of cartography or urban development over time. Below is a WorldMap WARP example using an 1885 Frederick Law Olmsted of the Back Bay Fens overlaid with Google Maps at varying transparencies. WorldMap is thus an extremely powerful learning and analysis tool that seems woefully underused.
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