Billing itself as "The Ultimate World Reference Atlas," Dorling Kindersley's Cartopedia brings the world to your multimedia PC. It sounds like an ambitious project, but for the most part DK pulls it off. Of course, any publisher intent on shoe-horning everyone's favorite planet onto one CD-ROM is going to have to make some editorial choices. Cartopedia's maps and graphics are nice, but Dorling Kindersley has wisely expended most of its energy on this product's almanac-style presentation of important historic, political, and cultural facts about each of the countries of the world.
Fans of Dorling Kindersley nonfiction books have become accustomed to a style of presentation typified by crystal-clear illustrations and text that is more caption than narrative. They will not be disappointed with Cartopedia. The photographs, text, and graphics are models of succinctness and clarity. The editorial content is offered in bite-size, predigested chunks that seem just about right--neither too shallow nor too detailed.
From the opening screen, you can choose to view the globe based on its physical features or its political boundaries. From that God's-eye-view, you zoom in on the country of your choice with a magnifying-glass cursor. The closest achievable scale is usually about 100 miles for every inch, although on some maps the ratio is more favorable. You can tell New York City from Trenton, New Jersey, and London from Oxford, but that's about as fine as the resolution gets. Don't expect to find Central Park.
Powerful indexing features allow you to search for countries alphabetically or for cities, politically prominent people, and physical features. Once you've narrowed your search to a particular country, you can look at it from a variety of angles. Each country's religions are tallied, its defense spending, its imports/exports, natural resources, tourism, health care, foreign aid, education, climate, transportation, and more. Most of these variables can then be compared with the same variables from any other country in the world. I learned, for example, that New Zealand has three and a half million people and fifty-five million sheep. Libya has five million people and only six million sheep. On the other hand, Libya has 2,150 armored tanks to New Zealand's 26. For every thousand inhabitants of Vanuatu, an island nation in the South Pacific, there are nine televisions, 26 cars, and 20 telephones; in the United States, those numbers are, respectively, 814, 570, and 723. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with this information, but I can almost feel myself becoming a sought-after Trivial Pursuit partner. You can also learn how each country ranks on such important cultural markers as life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, education, and even daily calorie intake.
Cartopedia includes a good quantity of impressive photographs and videos of many of the world's physical features, cities, and peoples. An audio pronunciation of each country's name is available at the touch of a button--a feature I made good use of with places such as Seychelles and Kyrgyzstan.
As much fun as it is to bring the world down to size by spending an hour or two in front of Cartopedia, one aspect of it made me uncomfortable. I hesitate to call it a drawback; it's more like a natural and unavoidable consequence of any attempt to fit the entire world onto one CD-ROM. I'm talking about the volatility of the information. As you're using Cartopedia, you know that many, perhaps most, of the figures you're reading are going out of date even as you're reading them. Of course, the world's physical features don't change all that rapidly, but it's the human dimension of the statistics in Cartopedia that make it interesting--and it's those very statistics which seem most unstable. But cartographers and almanac-makers have lived with that problem for centuries. The best publishers can hope for is to present a detailed cross-section of the world and its people at one moment in time--a sort of world-wide snapshot. And as snapshots go, Cartopedia is a beauty.
