An Introduction to Story Mapping

Introduction:

          This past week has been spent by introducing ourselves to storymapping on ArcGIS Online. In the 1985 Address from AAG President Pierce Lewis to the American Association of Geographers, Lewis takes great pains to illustrate the importance of description and story telling to the field of Geography. After establishing that Americans, while geographically challenged, "possess a strong innate curiosity about the world," Lewis extorts the Association "We need to make our geographic work more accessible and attractive to the general public." (472) Storymapping is a new technology that brings new-found accessibility of geographic information to a global audience, and as noted by Lewis in 1985, it plays on the geographer's strongest suit: the almost bizarre love for maps that every geographer innately seems to understand. "...our best works of geographic description, I think, have been cartographic." (470).

          To this end, the one prime objective for this class is going to be making our work accessible to the public. Generations after the first World War, in which 9 million men and women died over the course of a mere four years, the one hundredth anniversary of this tremendous and indelible scar on the face of history is one mere year away. And ESRI has worked to make the process of developing a new type of cartographic tool, the Storymap, more accessible than ever. ).

          The Story Map is a web application that hybridizes social media with GIS. The developer of this application can stitch photographs, video, tags, and comments into a map which they developed to showcase some geographic data or, of course, tell a geographic story. For example, a good story map may show the origins and destinations of Titanic passengers, the route it traveled, and some ancillary information relevant to its fateful voyage (fig 1). The results of our work this week should provide each student with an introduction to the story mapping platforms provided by ESRI through ArcGIS Online, and yield a web app that allows viewers to cycle through an overview of trip highlights and some of the work – and fun –that was had in France. Mostly the work though. Mostly.

figure 1: an example story map provided by ESRI

Methods:
          The ArgGIS Online website has several templates that utilize ESRI's ArcGIS for Apache Flex to make the process of building a storymap simple.  Photos can be hosted through ESRI's online servers, or on popular image sharing websites such as pinterest, flickr, or facebook.  From there, they can be imported directly onto ArcGIS Online and if they don't already have geographic coordinates attached to them, the images can be "drag-and-dropped" right onto their appropriate location in the map viewer application.  After creating a map in ArcGIS Online, complete with basemap and tracklogs data, the map is shared through a web application.  I used the "Map tour" template provided by ESRI, so with each image uploaded the developer can edit a title, description, and order for the image in the tour as the end user is guided through the information across the map.  Figure 2 provides a screenshot of the process.  Finally, the settings were manipulated to develop an aesthetically pleasing end product.


figure 2: editing an image's properties

Results:
          Figures 3 and 4 display a screenshot of my final interactive story map.  In the left window is a large resolution image that can grab an audience's attention, and in the right window is the geographical location for that image displayed over a colorful yet clean basemap.  Also included in the project is the tracklog from a student's handheld GPS which shows the progression of the trip.  As users click the left or right arrows to the side of the displayed images, they move through the tour chronologically as I designed it.  Along the bottom is a timeline where users can skip to any individual image in the lineup which they desire, and a caption is displayed for each.

Figure 3: creating a map tour of the Western Front

Figure 4: the final story map

          Now, end users can gain a quick overview of the field work done on this trip and learn a bit about the Western Front while they are at it. Here is a link to the map itself, for your viewing pleasure.

Sources:

Lewis, Pierce. "Presidential Address: Beyond Description." The Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 1985. 465-478.

"Geography, class, and fate: Passengers on the Titanic." ESRI. http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/titanic/ accessed 10/14/13