| Wula Na Lnuwe'kati: A Digital Multimedia Atlas |
| Ken Francis |
| Mapping Services Branch, Geomatics Canada, Natural Resources Canada |
| Ottawa, Ontario, Canada |
| E-Mail: kfrancis@nrcan.gc.ca |
This multimedia cartography application focuses on the Mi'kmaq aboriginal people population. The themes it covers are people, trade, geopolitics, canoe routes, etc. within Canada's Maritime provinces. Ken was kind enough to provide me with a hands-on demo at his studio at NRCan, as well as respond to any questions or comments I had. The application was built with Macromedia Director, producing a hybrid of text, graphic and map images, as well movie and sound animations.
Quite frankly, I was a bit skeptical at the idea of multimedia cartography applications in general. Given my training background and interests (educationally and professionally), I was skeptical of the effectiveness of such an application. In the world of web mapping, distributed spatial data warehousing and computing, the following questions come to mind:
I quickly noticed I was looking at this application as a scientist, looking for geographic position, spatial data linkages, etc. As I navigated through the application, I realized that I had to broaden my view with regard to the scope of the application to learn more about it. Soon after, I found myself enjoying the multimedia journey very much, often revisiting various nodes within the application. This gave me a better appreciation of the work involved in such a setup, and the brilliant use of hyperlinks to various outputs of information.
I found the user interface to be clean and well presented. The UI was not daunting, yet invited user interaction. I found the information was portrayed effectively. The use of text, imagery, sound and video was well thought out.
Overall, I very much enjoyed giving this application a test run. I believe this type of application can be beneficial to public lobby display portals, demonstrating an example of knowledge portals about Canada's aboriginal peoples.
If I had one suggestion for this application, it would be to publish via Internet protocol to reach a wider audience and scope of people. Ken responded this was a software compatibility issue and he looks forward to publishing it online when feasible.
In the big picture, this multimedia atlas is just as much a preservation, display and informative resource of Canada's aboriginal people, as is an archived database or scientific research data. I believe this is an excellent example of how a geographic application can aid in our country's heritage awareness and history.