The first, hand-drawn, hand-lettered map published in The Art Bulletin, for Charles Rufus Morey's article, "The Sources of Medieval Style" (1924 vol. 7, no. 2)

is as rich in information as the map in Suzanne Blier's Featured Article, "Imaging Otherness in Ivory: African Portrayals of the Portuguese ca. 1492 (1993 vol. 75, no. 3) published nearly seventy years later.

In the past twenty years, digital technology has drastically changed map-making capacities, providing templates and tools for tagging and embedding data and multiple media (other maps, photographs, video, audio, text, and KML - a geographical annotation system for internet-based maps and browsers).  Digital maps, like the one shown below, can be densely layered with information and interactive.  Just as they have become invaluable tools for research and teaching, they could change the way we contextualize our subjects in our publications. 

Above is a screen shot of the home page of AfricaMap, which Blier developed as part of the WorldMap project at the Center for Geographical Analysis at Harvard University.  (A video for how to use AfricaMap is available here.)