W-MAP
Geospatial conflict archive.
Origin
Following a developing conflict means holding a dozen tabs open and reconciling them yourself — each outlet covering a fragment, none showing you the shape of the thing. W-MAP was an attempt to put that on one map: geolocated markers and drawn territory, each entry cited to a named source, so the picture and its evidence stayed attached to each other.
How it works
Sources
Wire services, newspapers and policy institutes, each cited
Archive writers
A verified role that could write and edit the written record
Map engineers
A separate role that placed markers and drew territory
Published
The map and the archive, kept attached to their evidence
The hard part
Two things, and the second is the one I'd point at. Getting markers and drawn shapes to behave on a live map is fiddly but solvable. The harder problem was editorial: deciding who could change what. Splitting contributors into archive writers and map engineers meant the written record and the cartography were reviewed by different people against different standards, which is the only reason a two-person project could let anyone else contribute at all.
Decisions
Separate roles for writing and for cartography
They are different skills judged by different standards. One permission level for both would have meant trusting everyone with everything, which at this scale means trusting no one with anything.
A citation attached to every entry
On contested ground, a map without sources is just an assertion with better graphics.
Stopping it
Keeping an archive honest is a permanent commitment, not a launch. Neither of us could give it that, and a stale conflict map is worse than none.
Constraints
- Two people, both doing it alongside everything else
- Sources frequently contradict each other on contested ground
- Every claim had to carry a citation, which put a hard ceiling on how fast the archive could grow
Stack
Application
- React
- GSAP
- Motion
Mapping
- Leaflet
- OpenStreetMap
- CartoDB tiles
Data
- Firebase
- Cloudinary
Accessibility
- UserWay
- Cookie-Script
Why it stopped
Built with a collaborator, who prefers not to be named. We both chose to stop and put the time into work we wanted to go deeper on — for me that was Répertoire. The site is still up and the archive still reads, but nothing new is being added, and pretending otherwise would be the easiest way to lose your trust in everything else on this page.