Planning a Story Map
Creating a story map with ArcGIS StoryMaps can be an easy way to create webpages that display interactive map and multimedia content to your audience.
To create the best story map possible, there's a few things to consider and plan for. This guide will walk you through some of those steps and address some frequently asked questions.
What do you want your story to say?
A common pitfall of many story maps is how they try to fit too much in one piece. When in the early stages of planning, try to boil down what you want to communicate to a few key points.
As an example, Ancient LA's Why Did Whales Get So Big? (opens in a new tab) was created with the following takeaways in mind:
- The blue whale is the largest animal to have ever existed
- Their size and evolution was influenced by enivronmental factors
- The changing climate could influence the success of these animals
The jist of Why Did Whales Get So Big? was to make the connection between how large environmental factors can influence a group of animals' evolution and how complex this relationship can be over geologic time.
What content will you need?
Now that you know what the core message of your story will be, take stock of what you have and what you'l need to convey these points to your audience. What maps will you need? What data will these maps be visualizing? Will your story require lots of images and graphics?
Above is an exampe of a content inventory for the Why Did Whales Get So Big. As you can see, data sources were listed for each of the maps — this step can be extremely helpful when trying to plan out the time needed to complete story map.
If you are planning to make use of data-rich maps, make sure to account for the time it can take to find, clean and adequately visualize a dataset.
Assemble a team and assign roles
Now that you have a general idea of what you want to convey with your story map, you'll want to identify people who can fill the following roles.
- Story teller: responsible for crafting the actual narrative for the Story Map
- Content specialist: is knowledgeable about the topic that the story map is about, e.g. a curator or collection manager
- Tech lead: someone who has GIS experience and can both create the map/multimedia assets and create the story map
These three generic roles do not have to be filled by three people. Theoretically, a single person could assume all three roles or multiple people on a team could share a role. The size of the team will all depend on the scope and ambition of the project.
Create an outline
With the pieces of content you'll use and your team assembled, you can start to think about the actual structure of the story map. Having someone who knows the potential of the ArcGIS StoryMap platform can be beneficial so as to guide the outline in a direction that can best translate to an actual Story Map.