The idea that a map can tell a story or illuminate a timeline is not new but it appeals to the geo evangelist in me. Nowadays it is pretty easy to produce a fairly slick map that tells a story.
- The Knight Foundation have StoryMap JS which has some simple but elegant examples in its gallery like this Yahoo map of the World Cup nations. You could say that these maps are more about the images than the map but it is a neat way to tell the story and it works for me.
- MapStory is an open source app that enables the user to build and share animated time sequence maps. Have a look at ‘The spread of the killer bees” for a good example but remember to switch the legend on or it really doesn’t tell you anything.
- Esri offer their StoryMap service which fuses multimedia into elegantly curated stories which are a lot more than just another animated map. I like the approach of 10 National Parks threatened by oil trains for example.
Esri’s StoryMap really is sweet and building a story map using one of their templates looks pretty simple to me, I couldn’t find an animation option (which seems to be MapStory’s key differentiator) but maybe a bit of custom coding would get you there. MapStory feels a bit clunky and certainly the examples in the gallery don’t have the polished feel of StoryMaps or StoryMap JS (if you aren’t confused by the variants of ‘map’ and story’ yet you should be).
When one of the Esri twitter accounts pointed at a StoryMap I was expecting something pretty neat
'That's Amazing! A Tribute to Huell Howser's Travel Shows' http://t.co/r8kKgJlrGG. #storymap by Esri partner @ISSIGIS pic.twitter.com/bDF76Tz2Nh
— ArcGIS StoryMaps (@ArcGISStoryMaps) October 27, 2014
Unfortunately this example shows that just loading points into a story map does not tell any story or add very much to the underlying data. This mass of pins and scrolling call out boxes with link-outs all over the place is just a mess, I am not sure what it is meant to be telling me or why Esri think this is a great example of their StoryMaps product. For non-Californians who don’t know him, Huell Howser was California’s answer to Michael Palin (but a little more constrained in terms of the places he visited), his programmes have something of a cult following.
Story Maps or Map Stories can communicate ideas either navigating via the map or linking a story line and images to the map or by animating timelines, they can be interactive multimedia spatial infographics (that sounds like I have signed up for the Esri marketing team) but they can also be really naff, crass and cartocrap [(c) Kenneth Field] if we aren’t careful
5 thoughts on “A #WTF Story Map”
The “story map” name is a bit confusing. This, from the Esri Story Map white paper (pdf) helps clarify:
“Story” in this context is not a traditional text-based narrative; rather, it’s the concept or message that a story map is intended to communicate. Text is an essential component of most story maps, but it plays a supporting role, with the map or series of maps taking center stage.
Congratulations on your new position 😉
Actually I just have one comment – you can ‘animate’ Esri Story Maps if your data has time aware data. By animate I presume you mean that things change state or move based on some characteristic of your data. It’s not the Story Map that animates…it’s the web map that sits inside the template so if your web map has been published with time aware data then it appears with time aware capabilities by default.
e.g. https://bit.ly/1mLhScQ
There are other ways to show temporal characteristics though…tabbed links to different time slices, or the Map Journal approach of linear storytelling.
Ahah my bad – but that just makes Esri’s StoryMaps a load better. Particularly in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, which obviously isn’t me!
Could be a worry me becoming an Esri fanboy 🙂
Agreed there is a wide spectrum of “Story” types. A list is not a narrative.
Fortunately, there are much better examples. For example check out any of the Map Journals.
And the best thing is – all these tools you mentioned are open-source so enterprising and innovative developers can create new templates. As should be clear, I’ve been quite a fan of personal cartographies for a very long time.
Hiya Andrew
I guess I’m going to have to take some OpenData and create my own Story Map just to see what I can do with these tools.
Cheers