Storytelling With Maps: Building Content With Location to Market, Promote and Communicate
Content comes in many flavors, shapes, sizes and dimensions. Maps are an oft overlooked way to tell your story in advancing your cause, marketing your product, or promoting your service.
Maps lend themselves to storytelling. So many' things, if not darn near everything, has a geographic hook. Location, location, location - is an important attribute to any story. So why not use a map?
Many do.
Maps, used creatively, tell a story like no other medium.
Allen Carroll is the Program Manager of Storytelling for Esri - an international supplier of Geographic Information System software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications. He is located in Arlington, Virginia. Prior to joining Esri, he was the Chief Cartographer for the National Geographic Society.
Here's a discussion I had with Allen about telling stories with maps:
Tell us about storytelling with maps? How does this work?
Allen Carroll: Story Maps are single-purpose web applications that enable people to create stories that combine interactive maps with multimedia content—photos, videos, audio, text—to tell all sorts of stories. We’ve developed apps that enable various kinds of storytelling—including sequential narratives, sets of geo-tagged photos, single maps, series of maps, lists of points of interest—and that include builder functions.
The builders enable authors to create story maps without needing any web development skills. Many stories, including Map Tour, our most popular, employ “basic” maps that provide location alone; other stories can be used to present thematic maps that have been created using Esri’s ArcGIS software or built on ArcGIS Online, Esri’s cloud-based mapping platform. There are now well over 100,000 story maps, produced by thousands of organizations.
"Story Maps are single-purpose web applications that enable people to create stories that combine interactive maps with multimedia content—photos, videos, audio, text—to tell all sorts of stories.
How are maps, and for that matter how is location unique in being able to tell a story?
Allen Carroll: Location provides context and can be highly effective as “connective tissue” that can help bind the elements of a story into a successful narrative. Maps are hugely efficient ways of distilling and presenting information; they can also be quite beautiful. So maps and location can serve practical functions, but also can enrich a story’s visual and even emotional impact.
Messages resonate differently with different audiences. Some like visual. Some still prefer textual. Others prefer a combination. But when we think of visuals - maps don't necessarily jump out at us. How can maps be the right way of communicating?
Allen Carroll: We like to think that maps are special. Photos and videos convey lots of information, but maps provide an “anchor” that can relate elements of a story to one another and provide a setting and context for a narrative.
Thematic maps can add whole new elements to stories by depicting interrelationships and spatial patterns. Not all people like maps—some will always prefer text, photos, or videos—but most people do like maps. A skillfully woven narrative will be effective on several levels, meaning that those who don’t find maps appealing can focus on other elements of a multimedia story.
It would seem that maps are perfect for communicating things that are location specific. Or perhaps showing how a story unfolds across a geographic span. Then again, many, many stories have some tie to location in almost any message the story conveys. Do you believe that maps can be the backdrop for most messages in most industries?
Allen Carroll: I do. There are only a few ways of organizing information (chronologically, by subject, etc.), and among the most powerful ways is by location. Humans have a highly-sophisticated ability to understand spatial relationships. We’ve had to learn how to navigate through, and make sense of, a very complex world throughout our evolutionary history. Our brains carry impressively detailed mental maps. When we include maps in stories we tap this innate capability, and we enrich our stories as a result.
It’s also hard to imagine a story without some sort of geographic components. Before the advent of digital media, maps played a less central role in storytelling because they were static. Dynamic maps, with which you can pan, zoom, change themes, etc., have made maps potentially a much richer and more integral part of the storytelling process.
A map can now literally move you from one location to the next. And you, as viewer, can use the map to navigate within a story. So maps in the digital age have become much more powerful and useful as storytelling tools.
What's the best approach to getting started in communicating with maps?
Allen Carroll: Best approach is to visit our website, and explore it. You’ll find articles and blog posts describing storytelling and providing tips and best practices; you’ll see a list of our apps, which provide a variety of formats for map-based storytelling plus step-by-step tutorials for each of the apps; and an extensive gallery of previously-published story maps that you can filter by topic, app type, and more.
Best of all, though, is to dive in and start experimenting. With a free, non-commercial “public account” you can create, edit, and publish stories while you gain familiarity with our user-friendly builder functions.
Like any tool (think of PowerPoint), story maps get better the more you use them. Your first PowerPoint was probably pretty basic, right? But as you experiment, as you build more stories, you discover tricks and techniques. Plus you develop your own vocabulary, your own voice—just as you would as a budding novelist. There’s nothing like learning by doing. So start making story maps!
Jim Romeo is a freelance copywriter. Follow him on LinkedIn. Tell me your story: freelancewriting@yaooo.com or subscribe to my newsletter.