No longer in No Man's Land: Can cloud technology change academia?

Dr Noam Leshem explains how cloud is helping academics overcome issues when exploring uncharted lands

I've recently completed a 6,000-mile research expedition in search of no-man's lands, a five-week journey across 15 countries in search of some of the last unclaimed territories on Earth. Our aim is to understand what ‘no-man's lands' are, and why we should care about them in the 21st century.

Expeditions have gone a long way since pith helmets and imperial conquests. Today, this is a unique way to collect data, access resources, and importantly, engage and inspire people about the significance of contemporary social and geographical research.

One of our challenges when planning the expedition was finding a way to store large amounts of data - photographs, videos, sound recordings and documents collected along our route.

This wasn't just about data storage. We wanted to give people insights into the work we do in the field, an almost real-time experience of voices and sights we encountered, from the historic WWI battlefields in Northern France, to the migrant camps that suddenly emerged on the Slovenia-Croatia border or the stories of the Ababda nomadic tribe in the northern Sahara.

In other words, we needed a hub that would help us gather information and share it with our research partners around the world - NGOs in Cyprus or architects in Thessaloniki.

‘Disruptive' has become the buzzword for new technologies seeking to break with the past and do things differently. But we needed something that would be simple enough to enable us to integrate it into our research routines with little disruption as possible.

For this, my colleague Dr Alasdair Pinkerton from Royal Holloway University of London and I teamed up with Dropbox Business. From the early stages of planning, the cloud application enabled my team to have a concentrated platform where all this data-intensive media information for the expedition could sit.

And this was even more crucial when we were in remote regions while still hoping to share large video files with journalists who were covering our journey.

A huge issue when academic scientists are working in the field is the ability to have access to data easily and without hassle. We rarely have a computer lab to hand as we travel, or even an easily accessible network that can accommodate logging into different platforms.

One of the most eye-opening moments of our expedition took place while sitting with a group of tribesmen in Egypt's remote Southern Desert. While sipping spiced coffee, we struggled to explain the location of Bir Tawil, an unclaimed territory on the Egypt-Sudan border.

At one point, someone ran to the car and pulled out a tablet. In seconds, we were able to pull out numerous maps we had stored offline on Dropbox Business, even when there was no internet service for hundreds of miles.

Fieldwork used to be a very solitary experience. The boundaries between our work in the field and the broader community of scholars was hard to bridge, requiring extensive time to plan and much longer to execute. This is now rapidly changing with data flowing in real time, accessible to feedback from colleagues and students.

But perhaps most importantly, cloud technology is another tool that helps us transform academia into a sharing environment, open to collaborative work and to a wider audience around the world for whom no-man's lands are not just a figure of speech, but a challenging fact of life.