How Dropbox is helping modern-day explorers chart unclaimed lands

Thanks to Dropbox, the Into No Man's Land team will be able to collaborate on the go during their 6,000-mile trek

The desire to explore new and uncharted territory arguably forms part of the human condition.

From the first humans who left Africa when they crossed the Red Sea into the Middle East, through to Captain James Cook traversing the Pacific Ocean and James Scott's expedition to the Antarctic, people have always sought to explore the unknown.

The tradition continues into the 21st century, but while the explorers of old relied on outdated maps - often based on the works of ancient cartographers - and weren't able to make meaningful contact with those left behind, technology means today's explorers have the world at their fingertips and can collaborate on the go.

It's collaborative cloud technology that Dr Noam Leshem, political geographer at Durham University, will be using when he and his team embark this month on a 6,000-mile, six-week expedition around Europe, Africa and the Middle East to chart some of the last truly unclaimed spaces on earth in a project titled "Into No-Man's Land".

"I'm leading an expedition driving from England to Egypt's Sudan border in search of No-Man's Land. It's an exploration of a concept that's very commonly used but very rarely explored in any rigorous manner," Dr Leshem told Computing.

"What we're trying to do is basically try and understand what no-man's lands are, what their origins are and why we should care about them in the 21st century."

The project is a collaboration between Royal Holloway and Durham universities and also has support from the Royal Geographical Society. It's also backed by businesses and industry, including Dropbox, which will be helping the team to analyse and share their findings.

According to Dr Leshem, Dropbox's ability to allow team members to share resources and collaborate makes it a valuable "all-in-one" software tool for the expedition.

"We had various technologies for storing information and searching projects but they were often separate visual, video and data storing websites and clouds. What Dropbox For Business enables us to do is to have a concentrated platform where all the information for the expedition is, not just the inputs but also the outcomes," he said.

Dropbox will therefore be used to collect and disseminate data, and will enable the team to share their findings with the public via videos, podcasts and online seminars.

"These are very data intensive media and what Dropbox enables us to do is store everything in one place and to do both the collection and the dissemination from one site," Dr Leshem said.

"Sharing our Dropbox files with students will really enable us to make this easy, quick and relatively labour light," he continued. "A lot of the hurdles had been the labour intensity of sharing these things; the technological know-how that it required. Now that it's this simple, it's made our lives very much easier."

Being cloud based means the collaboration tool allows the team to access data using smartphones, tablets or laptops - whatever device is to hand.

"That's a huge issue when academic scientists are working in the field. The ability to have access to data in an easy and relatively light manner is really significant," Dr Leshem told Computing.

"We're going to be travelling close to 6,000 miles during this expedition and we're not going to have a computer lab or even an easily accessible network that can accommodate accessing different platforms," he continued, adding that in-car Wi-Fi will provide enough bandwidth to collaborate and share with Dropbox.

"Knowing we can use the wireless systems that are now a part of contemporary vehicles and use that just to get quick updates on documents being edited or receiving communication, that makes a huge difference."

A key area for the Into No-Man's Land team is "democratising data collection", Leshem explained, and "opening research to people around the world" by allowing people living in no-man's lands to contribute to the project.

"People from the Bangladesh or India border or old Australian mining towns, we want to know about it," said Dr Leshem, who described how "we can invite them to contribute to the project through a simple drag and drop tool we've been developing with Dropbox and that's really significant in building a whole new database."

That drag and drop tool sums up what Dropbox is bringing to the No-Man's Land project: "easy and intuitive" technology that will take a lot of pressure off what may well be a fairly gruelling expedition.

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