This week, I have continued to work on my StoryMap on Indigenous life in Wayne County, as well as cross-referencing and editing my website and the accompanying essay. I’m also looking forward to meeting with the Cultural Education for the Delaware Tribe of Indians, a second Delaware group in Oklahoma, to discuss my project and establish an ongoing process of review. In keeping with my November theme, I want to talk more about the different ways that StoryMaps can be used for digital storytelling, and discuss what I’ve learned about the tool since I have spent an additional week with it.
Overall Design
I feel like I didn’t clarify this in my last post, but I want to emphasize that StoryMaps is not so much a website builder as it is a digital storytelling tool that gives you one page to work with. What I mean by that is that if you wanted to build an expansive website with multiple pages, like my WordPress site, StoryMaps would not have the capability to do this. You can link other published StoryMaps to each other and easily add navigation tools within an individual StoryMap, but StoryMaps nonetheless is not a full site builder. If you wanted to make a site that was comprised of all StoryMaps, you would have to use another site-building tool as a base and either embed or link your StoryMaps to this main page.
Images, Text, and Organization
As I mentioned in my last blog, StoryMaps uses a block editor much like WordPress, but one of the advantages (or disadvantages, if you want a lot of customizability) of StoryMaps is that many of the blocks are much more standardized. For example, where you can build your own cover block in WordPress and add whatever elements you want (buttons, text, headings, even other images), StoryMaps has a pre-made block with a few options to choose from when it comes to choosing your cover.
Likewise, StoryMaps has an automatic option to add page navigation that is linked to any headings. This would have to be built from scratch in WordPress unless it was made to be a template. Additionally, you have fewer options for blocks in StoryMaps, such as maps, paragraphs, headings, images, videos, timelines, embeds, and audio. However, even though that doesn’t seem like a lot, I have found that I use this limited set of blocks to really let the story itself shine through. Overall, the block standardization makes the building process much faster, and you can focus on things like adding images, writing your text, and building your maps.
Map Building
As I mentioned in my last post, the central aspect of StoryMaps is a story that centers around a map (hence the name). At first, building my own map seemed like it would be challenging, as my GIS experience doesn’t go beyond using Google Maps to make sure I’m getting off at the right exit. However, much like the overall design of the tool, which is intuitive and doesn’t overwhelm you with too much control, the map builder gives you a lot of options to illustrate different types of stories but with a clean interface that makes building a map about as easy as finding an address on Google Maps. In all honesty, the most difficult part of the process was not working with StoryMaps, but rather working with my print sources that gave fuzzy details about the locations of sites that are no longer standing.
Guided Tours vs. ExpressMaps
The map builder gives you two options: express maps, and guided tours. Guided tours are probably the easier option for unseasoned StoryMap users: building a guided tour is as easy as pinning a single location on a map, adding some text and images, and deciding if you want your tour to be in “explore mode” or if you want your stops to follow in sequence. I used the guided tour builder to take viewers through some local sites. I decided to use explore mode because the sites didn’t follow in any particular order.
Express maps are the more difficult option, which for reasons beyond my comprehension I also started with. The express map builder has different options to illustrate different geographic concepts. For example, you can add points to your map with images and descriptions, much like the guided tour, you can add map actions to make your map move, and you can add routes, outlines, and text to your map. The express map builder does take some practice to perfect, and the process of accurately drawing a geographic area can be tedious.
I have been using the express map builder to approximately trace the routes of the Great, War and Killbuck Trails so folks can see where they went, and what towns they pass by today. I have been using Wilcox’s book on the subject to trace the trails along creeks and towns in Ohio, which has given me a fairly accurate picture of where these trails went. However, I have had to spend a lot of time milling over these descriptions and moving the trail to closely follow landmarks. Even so, I can’t guarantee that the trail locations are going to be 100% accurate.
As I have become more used to the different options to build an interactive map in StoryMaps, I can say that the tool is definitely more versatile than it appears at first blush. As I discussed in my last blog post, this tool has been used for a wide variety of projects. Even if your story doesn’t have a connection to maps, I would even recommend StoryMaps as a way to build a dynamic one-page digital story if you’re in a rush or if WordPress is too customizable. As just one example, Books Through Their Pages by Eli Boyne, Sabrena Johnson, Sara White of Tulane University’s Library doesn’t contain any maps, but uses dynamic blocks, text, and images to tell an engaging story nonetheless.