How has Africa Map Changed your View of Africa and Its History? What additions/changes would you like to see?

I think Africa Map has definitely increased the scope through which I looked at Africa. The map layers of information give a deeper sense of what is happening in Africa and with the landscape. Africa map has definitely been an amazing tool to use because there is so much that you can learn about the land, its history, people, how they live and what they do. It offers snapshots of moments in time that tell you so much about what was happening and how that compares to what is happening today. The fact that you can layer different maps of information and compare them directly is also a plus.

Layering Tool on Africa Map

I think that Africa map could definitely be improved though, there needs to be more information gathered for the map that would increase its usability. It would also be great if all the maps could be seen on google earth, that would make it easier to manipulate them and then upload them onto google maps. If the maps could be seen directly in google maps that would also be great. 

The things listed under the tab Places are a really good feature as well but there is no information about the amounts of quantities of them, they just appear on the map. For example when you click on hotels, little red triangles appear on the map but what do they mean? What are we classifying as hotels? The quantity listed next to hotel in the Places tab says that there are 1120 hotels. That number seems really small for the whole of Africa so there must be some way that whoever plotted these hotels is defining hotels. We don't know though so the information is useless.

Hotels in Africa

You can also only do one of the things under the tab Places at a time so you can't compare the prevalence of them directly because they are all represented by small red triangles. That makes using the map really hard. Those are the only things that I would improve on, overall Africa Map is a great tool but it definitely needs to be further developed.