AFRITERRA: The Cartographic Open Library

You know how 'tight' a student of any race can feel, when hearing the same things every day?  Like circling in fog, they need 'form' and 'direction'.

What the Afriterra Cartographic Library does, is open a window called Africa, using rare detailed maps with visual technology, zooming into 5000 different historical spaces, and clearing a path to understand diversity.

In fact, an immediate result occurred just last week in Tampa, when one teacher using one phone-link, lead 50 eager eyes along the Nile River back to its origin. Each click became a personal experience; and of course, it suddenly created a host of young experts on the topic of Uganda. 

 Join us here in a perfect link of Arts, Humanities and Technologies, in this educational gift to any local school or scaled hotspot, as a means to build a student’s global identity, more tolerant and talented than ever.

The Problem is Intrinsic-Bias and Racial-Intolerance in such a scale as to evoke The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, emphasized in Article I: “All humans are…equal in dignity and rights…and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”. Intolerance, as a chronic tendency now presents such an urgency as to be cited in the International Religious Freedom Act, 1998. And more recently, the U.S. State Department and Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, DRL have further characterized this problem as encompassing all religious and ethnic prejudice, implicit bias, discriminatory education, employment hierarchy, stereotyping, scape-goating, hate-speech, persecution and violent acts.

The sequence of factors begins as a ‘disorder of aspect’, producing a ‘foreclosure of ‘Identity’. Forty years of research in Social-Identity-Theory/SIT and Self Categorization Theory/SCT, reveal these roots: a) self-worth, b) social-affirmation, and c) some perception of threat. This naturally tends toward schemas of in-group and out-group distancing. Separation closes attention to other elements unaccounted in one's memorable experience.

The problem is sustained by systemic barriers to educational content, indeed a 'disorder of advantage', which can be remedied here and now by a rapid global delivery of rich spatial content.

The solution is an HISTORICAL CARTOGRAPHIC LIBRARY embracing a philanthropic mission to digitally access and apply the rich cartographic record of Africa, enabling historical interpretation and transformative education.

Since 1995, a private foundation established the featured facility in Boston with a material endowment of over 5000 of the rarest original maps focused on Africa. The considerable content is achieved by cataloging, digitizing, and displaying a record spanning 500 years, covering all regions and scales in 8 different languages.

The following methods have worked easily to allow any person at any hotspot, to digitally create their own lessons, searches, questions, pathways, and identities based on their individual or community needs, using their own phone, tablet, or classroom projection.

1) A place-based ‘Lesson-Companion’, to localize, visualize, and realize a broader view of any current-event or lesson-plan in a ready handy display of rare historical details.

2) Searchable Database for any keyword, place, date, creator, or GPS coordinate.

3) Visual enhancements rotating, sliding, panning-and-zooming, cropping, and copying high-resolution images.

4) Engineering new applications and performances recognized in time and place:

• GIS/geo-info-referencing and temporally layering rare historical images.
• OCR/optical character recognition of unimaginable place-names digitally located.
• Global-Forum crowd-sources to connect user-creations with current events.

The Educators need service, as UNESCO in 2016 declared Sustainable Development Goals where Education is a human right for all throughout life, and that access must be matched by quality. This forms the Global Education Agenda 2030. It stands as an historic commitment to transform lives by a new vision for education, with bold and innovative actions.

Horace Mann, in 1848, gave us this target in Report No. 12 of the Massachusetts School Board:

"Education, then, is the great equalizer…, the balance-wheel of the social machinery”.

 Teachers and Administrators everywhere have needed our help. Their needs are glaring in the dearth of geographic content evident from the poor outcomes on the National NAEP/National Assessment of Educational Progress report-card, revealing only 25% of students scored above the proficient level in Geography.

 THE SYSTEMIC NEEDS:

•           Need to enrich content pertaining to Africa.

•           Need for visual aids in applying knowledge.

•           Need to reach every person.

•           Need for efficiency in time and cost.

•           Need for diversity to change intolerant perceptions.

THE INDIVIDUAL’S NEEDS:

•           Need for physical links to the contemporary events.

•           Need for historical links to modern life.

*            Need for worthy Identity.

We aim to serve every individual that has experienced INTOLERACE. 

Looking at the historical depth of this audience, Albert Einstein was once asked whether or not he believed in God?  Einstein replied: “I believe in Spinoza’s God…” He was certainly referring back to a staggering event in 1656 in Amsterdam where one of the most explicit documents of persecution was exacted on a young student, excommunicating him from a similarly persecuted Jewish sect for merely suggesting that God and Nature were in one harmony.

Here it stood:

  ”By the decree of the Angels and the word of the Saints we ban…, cut off, curse, and anathemize Baruch de Espinosa; Cursed be he by day, and cursed by night, cursed in his lying down, and cursed in his waking up, cursed in his going forth, and cursed in his coming in; and may the Lord not want his pardon, and may the Lord’s wrath…burn upon him….”.

How can a library specifically engage, impact, and intervene to overcome such intolerance in our present lives?

To begin, we can observe this Spinoza who rose over the worst intolerance and grew to illuminate a fusion of Ethics, geometry, and optics, as he points us toward technology to expand our immediate senses. In this direction, all targeted teachers everywhere can merge the mechanics of S.T.E.M with a grounding in Humanities, to forge a new sense of human awareness using the performance of Historical Geography.  

We can help by directly infusing diverse spatial experiences on the fingertips using the current technology so recently accelerated in the writings of Russell Southwood, "Less Walk More Talk: How Celtel and the Mobile Phone Changed Africa', and Mirjam de Bruijn,, Francis Nyamnjoh,  and Inge Brinkman, 'Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa'.

On historical maps, every inch is a storage of names; an encounter with the ‘other’. Lines become personal journeys across these gaps. This method impacts the ways that people can assemble space, and thus unpack fundamental truths about themselves, including their place in a greater world. Cartography expands the ‘image of self’ by expanding the space filled by ‘self’. Here, this channel brings substance to space…..by opening more experiences to grow the ‘self’ as a keen absorber of spaces. The conscious mind maps a string of personal experiences known as ‘self’, to which one may add certain other virtual or imagined experiences. The impact of all these experiences, (by recall or repetition), forms the basis of our very existence. Thus, to map…is to exist!

By accruing diverse spatial visits, Cartography engages an easement to re-cycle any student’s narrative-identity, and make-over the lingering roots of prejudice. Here is the opportunity to engage an instrument of ‘space’ to open other stories and external realities, with ample support to eclipse an intolerant view. Take a sip with this digital-straw. ‘To locate’.., is to be aware of another’s path, (Origins, Migrations, Encounters). Then any targeted society can notice people as a continuum. It starts with attention, to set the stage for a more perfect union.

As the world rumbles in the long shadows of discord, a gathered society can become both sustainable and tolerant by collectively recognizing everyone’s path. By repeatedly navigating these virtual migrations, an individual can readily inhabit another’s territorial identity. Indeed, one can actually recycle the ‘self’ even while standing in the supposedly rigid casts of distance, time, race, religion, culture, occupation, class, nationality, ideology, or any other group portrayal.

 From a purpose in Spinoza,

“The endeavor to understand… is the first and only basis of virtue”

To a conclusion in T.S. Eliot,

“…at the end of all our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time...”

Visual lines in Historical Cartography align precisely to the smoldering embers of racial intolerance. The lines become personal journeys across these gaps. 

Lessons locked within the Humanities can emerge by digital technologies to expand our immediate senses. Here, ‘to locate’ means to take notice of someone’s path, [Origins, Migrations, Encounters].

  Opening spatial-history aligns other narratives to re-cycle stages of one’s Identity. This is what distinguishes Cartography from other forms of communication.  The viewer is both outside the representation and enveloped by it. Becoming an experience, interrogating a map expands the ‘image of self’ by expanding the space filled by ‘self’.

The scale of Intolerance in all communities must be met with a stage of urgent Growth in specific Educational tools. The Afriterra Cartographic Library has completed a focused assembly of history which had been scattered and inaccessible to social development for centuries. If one of our digital clicks can surmount a life-time of bias, then a nation of clicks creates a nation of informants, and thus a new horizon of global identities.

In this case, Historical Cartography demonstrates ready methods to register new experiences and outcomes ranging from aptitude to attitude in a wide exposure of digital humanities.

The initial innovation is the Assemblage..., the orderly identification of a definitive cartographic record, previously scattered and sequestered over centuries, and now captured as a wholly re-sortable digital parade focused on Africa.

The urgent innovation is the Access....., the immediate delivery of 'opportunity' at the touch of any ardent student, teacher or any cellular hotspot throughout the world; forever now creating advantage where there was always disadvantage.

 The ultimate innovation is Aspect…., created by users personally absorbing diverse spatial experiences, approaching differently, forging a bond with all humanity, and collectively finding the world as a continuum of changing horizons.

The idea of using cartography to experience space and time is philosophically sound. Today, these methods can now expand the 'Identity of Self' by rapid repetition of limitless spatial experiences, overcoming any small bias using this ready touch of digital technology. 

Here is what radically distinguishes cartography from other forms of communication. The viewer is at the same time outside the representation and enveloped by it. By kinetic eye/hand pathways, the ‘Transport & Zooming’ immersion takes hold of intimate identities. Like tapping into oil-reserves, maps hold historical-energy. Quick fingers can repeatedly refresh a user-experience (a UX-journey), where diversity is etched in soil, where a space can be joined, where viewers imagine themselves differently, where fresh fountains of identity flow.

Finally, we further expect to find new patterns in history by developing innovative font-scanning, OCR/optical character recognition of unimaginable place-names, digitally discovered and magnified from countless fragile sheets.

The Afriterra Library understands numbers. We see numbers as ‘lives’ (individuals aspiring for historical resonance and meaning in life).

Our library currently records 10 views/day x 356 days/yr x 20 yr = 73,000 lives touched.

In the next singular year, with the resource reach of MIT-Solve, these immediate numbers stand here as noted by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

In the United States:

Teachers, 3.2 million, [80.1% White, 8.8% Hispanic, 6.7% Black, 2.3% Asian]

School Libraries 98,460; Public Libraries 9,057

1700 Public Universities, 2500 Private

132,853, Community schools.

Public: 91,147, [50.8 million students,]

Charter: 7,011, [3 million students]

Private: 34,576, [5.7 million students]

Home-school, [1,6 million students, 3.3 percent of all students].

In Africa, during the next 5-years, as an economic target, the second largest continent, the richest in natural resources, youngest in current population, and the deepest in the growth potential of key economies.

There are more than 50 million students within African schools and even more left out. This includes 200 public universities and 468 private colleges. Additionally more than 250,000 students from sub-Saharan Africa are enrolled in universities abroad. Just one percent increase in average level of education in Africa would raise annual GDP 12 percent. The returns on investment in higher education is 21 percent in Africa—the highest in the world.

Our one Library’s impact, [re-orienting the past], will transform a wall of isolated numbers into a recognizable, cohesive, global society, if only we can take a look.

Quality Education Impact

The Process measure currently records uploaded records of historical significance:

4000 scans 

40,000 meta-data entries.

Dissemination-Impact now rests on out-reach marketing, and network promotion.

Number of Contacts

Number of Subscribers

Number of User URL visits

Geographic Aptitude Tests

Social Impact of Geography [Diversity, Tolerance, Equality, Peace, Justice]

In keeping with the UNESCO and the National Geographical Standards, the Impact of Cartography remains highly attractive in how it makes one feel, producing an emotional impact drawn from the contoured lines of nature. We know that being ‘lost’ feels deeply vulnerable, whereas acquiring ‘context’ gives a liberating release from threat. Here is what radically distinguishes the impact of cartography from other forms of communication.  The viewer is at the same time outside the representation and enveloped by it. The ‘transport & zooming’ immersion takes hold of intimate identities. Like tapping into oil-reserves, maps hold historical-energy. They can fuel hours of curiosity about what was or is relatable. Here is a platform where any hand can repeatedly refresh a user-experience (a UX-journey), where diversity is etched in the soil, where a space can be joined, where viewers imagine themselves differently, where fresh fountains of identity flow.

Our Social-Impact is measured in visual clicks that close distances, and acknowledge placements on a user screen.

These final measurements of Social-Impact need MIT-SOLVE funding to design and report survey testing before and after content use:

AIR, American Institutes for Research

Personality Inventory and Self-Perceived-Identity Surveys.

Implicit Bias Surveys.

Cultural-Sensitivity-Surveys.

Global Impact Network, GIIN/IRIS+

1 full-time volunteer manager

1 part-time volunteer database engineer

1 part-time digital scan contractor

1 part-time web-design contractor

0 full-time staff

The Afriterra team carries life-long principles of 'Passion' and 'Order' to capture these positions:

The Afriterra 'Authoritative Position' stands emphatically on the 'material-record', revealing untold positions laid down during 500 years, documenting countless measurements, names, relationships and metadata as intellectual property. By opening this actual material, every individual user can ascend this same position of 'authority'.

Our Tactical-Position strikes the largest visual-footprint, reinforced by simple order and immediate ready access.

Our position is ready, like a coiled-spring, quivering with stored energy, gathered carefully over 25 years. The coil is literally compressed into one small chamber, fully loaded with 5000 visual images and millions of data points. The historical blast of such a spring is only waiting for a necessary trigger to lift this ‘prize’ back into the atmosphere of a global cloud.

This position is an outgrowth of the vision, talents, and passion of our highly motivated advisory board having ground level studies in Tanzania, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Oxford, Paris, Padua, and rural Alabama.

Executive Director: Gerald J. Rizzo M.D., Project Manager

Board Member, Robert R. Bellinger, PhD, Professor of History and African-American Studies, Suffolk University, Boston, MA

Board Member: Thomas J. Bassett PhD, Professor of Geography, University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, and History of Cartography Project, University of Wisconsin.

Board Member, Lucia Lovison-Golob PhD, Instructor, Geographical Information Systems.

Board Member, Timothy C. Weiskel, MLS, DPhil (Oxon)

Intrinsically, bias reflects the impact + the repetition of a given set of experiences. Forty years of research in Social-Identity-Theory/SIT and Self Categorization Theory/SCT, reveal these three roots: a) self-worth, b) social-affirmation, and c) some perception of threat. This naturally tends toward schemas of in-group and out-group distancing. Separation closes attention to other elements unaccounted in one's memorable experience. We see that opening spatial-history can reconcile other narratives to re-cycle stages of one’s Identity, (diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, achievement)

In this direction, the leadership team of the Afriterra Library embodies the value of everyone everywhere to merge the mechanics of S.T.E.M with a grounding in Humanities, to forge a new sense of human awareness using the performance of Historical Geography.  

By accruing diverse ‘spatial visits’, we open an easement to re-cycle our narrative-identity, and make-over the lingering roots of prejudice. Here is the opportunity where an instrument of ‘space’ can open other stories and external realities, with ample support to eclipse an intolerant view

‘To locate’.., is to be aware of another’s path, (Origins, Migrations, Encounters). Then society can notice people as a continuum. It starts with attention, to set the stage for a more perfect union.

As the world rumbles in the long shadows of discord, a gathered society can become more tolerant by collectively recognizing everyone’s path. Indeed, one can actually recycle the ‘self’ even while standing in the supposedly rigid casts of distance, time, race, religion, culture, occupation, class, nationality, ideology, or any other group portrayal. 

In an 'all volunteer' effort, The Afriterra Cartographic Library has created FOCUS and ACCESS to the History and Geography of Africa, With material and cost in control, we are now applying here to overcome the only limits remaining in finding and funding personnel for these specific NEEDs:

Materials need Personnel.

   *Geo-reference Librarian

   *Out-Reach Marketing Agent

   *Network Contacts

   *Institutional Partnerships

For centuries scattered and lost from view, the vivid details of Africa are now gathered and secured for all schools' consumption; Never to be lost again.

The Afriterra Library has secured the physical objects, but a public need requires a human 'Network',  'Marketing-Expert' and an 'Out-come Register'.

The Technology has brought the 'Past' to the Here-and-Now', but the 'Future' will require us to create new technology in our goal to map multi-disciplinary information systems, and create  font-recognition software or OCR/optical character recognition to find and match untold place-names engraved in thousands of documents.

The Afriterra Cartographic Library would like to partner with:

 Alexis Ohanian, Initialized,

MDR/Dun & Broadstreet Division of Education Marketing,

EBSCO,

Wikimedia AfroCrowd,

AIR, American Institutes for Research, Arlington VA

Social Science Research Center, University of Chicago

AND

MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences/SHASS

MIT-Africa Program, International Science and Technology Initiatives/MISTI,

MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab/J-WEL, and Global MIT

MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, CAVS/Program in Art, Culture, Technology/ACT; 

MIT, History, Theory and Criticism/HTC

MIT Center for Arts, Science, and Technology/CAST

MIT Media Lab; Digital Learning & Collaboration Studio, Creative Learning, Public Library Innovation Exchange/PLIX

Education is not 'Disabled', it is just 'Disadvantaged'.

The Afriterra Cartographic Library is the precise lazer-focus, and the rare-access that has been missing in the 'Education of Context'. Our Africa place-based 'Lesson-Companion' is ready, free, and inclusive to bring an equitable light to the truly equitable touch of any finger. 

The enemy of Education has always been the 'locked-cabinets'. We took these cabinets apart, and found meaning everywhere. Years of research has demonstrated that spatial tracking is the most effective way to realize  patterns and meaning, By locating actual names and paths, a student finds equitable understanding of all people through their migrations, and their untold stories.

To eclipse Racial-Intolerance, the Afriterra Cartographic Library intends to ‘make space’ in one’s own Identity.

We supply the mind with places and spaces. Then the student can find the lines and connections that build a world view.

We know… to locate… is to relate.

‘To locate’.., is to be aware of another’s path, (Origins, Migrations, Encounters). Then society can notice people as a continuum. It starts with attention, to set the stage for a more perfect union.

 We give the prize of Cartography which expands the ‘image of self’ by expanding the space filled by ‘self’, and by opening more experiences to grow the ‘self’ as a keen absorber of spaces. The impact of all these experiences, (by recall or repetition), forms the basis of our very existence. Thus, to map…is to exist….

Take a sip with this digital-straw. Here is what radically distinguishes Cartography from other forms of communication.  The viewer is at the same time outside the representation and enveloped by it. The ‘transport/zooming’ immersion takes hold of intimate identities. Like tapping into oil-reserves, maps hold historical-energy. Here is a platform where any hand can repeatedly refresh a user-experience (a UX-journey), where diversity is etched in the soil, where a space can be joined, where viewers imagine themselves differently, where fresh fountains of identity flow.

Indeed, one can actually recycle the ‘self’ even while standing in the supposedly rigid casts of distance, time, race, religion, culture, occupation, class, nationality, ideology, or any other group portrayal.

To eclipse Racial-Intolerance, the Afriterra Cartographic Library intends to ‘make space’ in one’s own Identity.

We supply the mind with places and spaces. Then the student can find the lines and connections that build a world view.

We know… to locate… is to relate.

‘To locate’.., is to be aware of another’s path, (Origins, Migrations, Encounters). Then society can notice people as a continuum. It starts with attention, to set the stage for a more perfect union.

 We give the prize of Cartography which expands the ‘image of self’ by expanding the space filled by ‘self’, and by opening more experiences to grow the ‘self’ as a keen absorber of spaces. The impact of all these experiences, (by recall or repetition), forms the basis of our very existence. Thus, to map…is to exist….

Take a sip with this digital-straw. Here is what radically distinguishes Cartography from other forms of communication.  The viewer is at the same time outside the representation and enveloped by it. The ‘transport/zooming’ immersion takes hold of intimate identities. Like tapping into oil-reserves, maps hold historical-energy. Here is a platform where any hand can repeatedly refresh a user-experience (a UX-journey), where diversity is etched in the soil, where a space can be joined, where viewers imagine themselves differently, where fresh fountains of identity flow.

Indeed, one can actually recycle the ‘self’ even while standing in the supposedly rigid casts of distance, time, race, religion, culture, occupation, class, nationality, ideology, or any other group portrayal.