Explore with Culture Atlas
Overview
Culture Atlas is an online learning environment and immersive journey through world cultures. Our UX (user experience) reimagines the globe as an educational interface tailored to the needs of high school teachers and students. Culture Atlas encourages sensory exploration and contextual knowledge, leading to deeper engagement and mastery of subjects including history, geography, social sciences, music and the arts.
We believe that curiosity and wonder motivate students of all ages, and the best way to learn is to explore. Our goal is to become a go-to resource for secondary (grades 6-12) students and educators, while also addressing users in travel & tourism, home schooling, and continuing education.
Our app contains a growing database of over 250,000 educational assets including interactive maps, articles, multimedia journeys, and our own instructional videos, curated by a team of experts and teachers. Monthly content and feature updates will expand our current experience.
We’re reinventing the encyclopedia to enhance cultural literacy.
Available on iPad Version 5 or newer.
Culture Atlas Interface
There are many ways to find, filter and view information in the Culture Atlas. To start, find the Navigation Bar, which displays the various icons to access our content, on the bottom of your screen.
The Search function, represented by the magnifying glass, allows you to search for any person, place or thing that you’d like to learn more about. Just type your topic into the Search bar and be transported directly to that part of the world.
Bookmarks allow you to save your favorite locations, articles, maps, and videos so you can revisit them or access them for reporting purposes.
Tutorials showing how to use all of the features in the App and how to access the diverse content, can be found in the Settings section represented by the Gear icon on the Navigation Bar.
*All images taken from Culture Atlas iPad, 2023
*Interface will vary on web-app
Globe View
Globe View can be accessed through the Globe icon in the Navigation Bar. In this mode, you are able to spin the globe with a swipe of your finger and zoom in on any geographic area to find out more about the key people, places, and events in that location. Tap on any of our vast collection of Data Records to enter Focus View.
Globe View now includes icons for over 20,000 Wikivoyage pages and 1,000+ UNESCO World Heritage sites. Combined with our growing library of articles, images, videos and more, Globe View offers unlimited opportunities for exploring our planet.
Globe View Filters, located within the Settings section indicated by the Gear icon in the far right of the Navigation Bar, include Disciplines (art, history, etc.), Features (cities, country names, etc.), Data Types, and School Mode for related access licenses. Any and all of these filters may be toggled off/on in the settings menu.
Map View
Culture Atlas contains over 8,000 historical maps that have been converted from 2D images into 3D objects that are geotagged and conformed to the earth’s surface.
Map View, accessed through the Map icon in the Navigation Bar, displays maps from a variety of time periods, some going back over 7,000 years. Related maps are grouped in a scrolling column on the right side of the app screen and related files are grouped in a scrolling column on the left.
When chosen, these maps are overlaid on top of the geographic location to allow you to zoom in for a better understanding of the topography and country borders in that region during that time period.
The Opacity scale along the bottom of the map allows the current geography to show through the map.
To exit Map View, use the bottom Navigation Bar to either return to Map View or explore other areas of the app.
Focus View
After a record has been tapped, it will move to the center of the screen, becoming the Focused Record, displaying in-depth text or images related to the subject.
Directly to the right, the user may scroll through the Linked Records, which contain additional text or images closely tied to the focused record.
In the far left and right columns, the users will find the related records. These records may be linked to the focused record by a direct relationship between the two records as well as by subject, place, and/or time period.
Tour View
Culture Atlas includes a growing collection of interactive virtual tours (our Journeys and Map Chronicles, detailed below) that can be seen in Tour View, accessed by the clicking on the third icon from the left in the bottom Navigation Bar. Journeys and Map Chronicles can also be accessed via their related bins in the Library of the app, also detailed further below.
Our Journeys and Map Chronicles are cultural narratives that provide in-depth profiles of a variety of topics (cities, countries, historical events, etc.) and enable viewers to dive into related resources (articles, videos, and more) at each step along the way.
Map Chronicles
Map Chronicles, our newest feature in Culture Atlas, include a chronological sequence of historical maps and contextually-related images along with links to music audio files, internet articles, videos, and other web resources to provide an immersive cultural narrative of a given locale. The image below is a screenshot from the Cairo Map Chronicle, one of 15 maps accompanied by 20 images. The icons on the right side of the screen are individual slides (maps and images) and the icons on the left are links to web resources related to the current slide in the center of the screen.
The bottom narrative window provides a running commentary on the relevance of the current slide to the overall story of the Map Chronicle being viewed.
For more information see our short demo video of the Map Chronicle feature.
Journeys
Journeys tell the stories of important places, expeditions, travels and events throughout history. Follow the prompts as we lead you on interactive journeys across the globe, allowing you to learn more about important locations, figures, and related developments along the way. Our journeys provide access to numerous online resources (Wikipedia & Wikivoyage articles, YouTube videos, etc.) and a slideshow function wherein users can watch a sequence of images often while hearing contextually-related music.
For more information see our short demo video of the Journeys feature.
Library
The Library, represented by the list icon, is where you can access videos, maps, and other interactive features that bring the Culture Atlas to life.
The Featured section highlights the newest or most timely videos and articles in the Culture Atlas database. Our 2-10 minute immersive Videos are arranged by continent and country, allowing you to get an insider’s view of places and topics ranging from Armenian Music to Zimbabwe. The bins for Journeys, Lessons, Maps, and Map Chronicles are where we store these related files.
The Resources section lists dozens of indexes of world cultures that link to sources outside the App for additional content and more information.