The Internet, the airwaves, and print media are rife with cause-related marketing. How many times, for instance, have you encountered ads by oil companies and automobile manufacturers touting their “green” practices? Cause-related mapping, on the other hand, is a far less common phenomenon.

What is cause-related mapping? It’s my own term, so I’m happy to propose a definition: It’s the use of maps, in combination with other rich media, to inform and engage the public in support of important causes.

There is vast, untapped potential in cause-related mapping. Consider three facts:

1. Every issue you can think of, from climate change to poverty reduction to job creation, has interesting and important geographic characteristics.
2. Maps reveal spatial patterns, facilitate understanding, and help us make sense of the world.
3. Most people like maps.

And yet how many times can you recall an organization using maps to show you why an issue is important and what you can do about it? Hardly ever, right?

Story map on the ecological footprint of nations

Now that maps are enabled via the Internet and distributed to our laptops, tablets, and smartphones, the potential for using them to catalyze awareness and action has become all the greater. Maps used to tell us stories in a singularly understated way. Now, supercharged by digital technology, distributed instantaneously across electronic networks, and enlivened by innovative user experiences, they’ve become much more active and versatile storytellers.

Our story maps team is beginning to explore this largely uncharted territory of cause-related mapping. One of our early projects highlighted the Global Footprint Network’s insightful examination of the rates at which most nations are overspending their ecological capital:

Recently we teamed up with the National Audubon Society to depict the life cycle of the Piping Plover, a shorebird that nests, precariously, adjacent to Atlantic Coast beaches and is thus in constant conflict with Homo sapiens recreationi. The story reveals the many threats facing these beautiful little birds as they breed, migrate, and winter, and it shows how Audubon is working to protect it at every step of the way.

Piping Plover story map, a collaboration with Audubon

A few months ago we collaborated with IUCN, the big international conservation organization, to raise awareness of the increasing threat that human activities are bringing to the diverse array of life on earth. The conservation community depends on IUCN’s “Red List” as the definitive catalog of thousands of rare and endangered species worldwide. Our story map profiles a selection of these species via a world map. A click on a map icon generates a species profile, including a close-up range map, photo, text description, and link to technical information.

IUCN Red List story map

These examples only hint at the potential of cause-related mapping. Thousands of humanitarian and conservation organizations administer countless projects in nearly every corner of the earth. Yet few people are aware of the vast scope of these operations. Wouldn’t donors be inspired to see the distribution and breadth of these efforts? Wouldn’t you, as a potential donor or volunteer, want to know more about the local, on-the-ground work of the groups that you support? Wouldn’t more people be inspired to support conservation if they could track, in near-real time, the movements of animals across threatened landscapes?

Maps can help turn abstract issues into tangible, understandable, solvable stories. Maps can inspire action. Let’s use them not only to measure and observe the world, but to change it.

My definition is simple: a map is an answer to a question.

There are three basic kinds of maps that answer three basic types of questions:

• The Location map answers the question, “Where am I?”
• The Navigation map answers the question, “How do I get there?”
• The Spatial Relationships map answers the question “How are these things related?”

It’s this third type of map—a map that helps in our understanding of spatial patterns and relationships—where we as GIS professionals spend most of our time.  We work hard making our maps.  Our maps can be beautiful works of art, but that’s not why we make them.  We make them to answer a question, to solve a problem, and to advance our understanding.  And therein lies the power of the map.

Even the best maps have no power by themselves; they just exist, like the maps you hang on your office wall, or the maps in the world atlas sitting on your bookshelf.  But depending on how they are created, and how they are used, maps can have tremendous power.

For a map to become truly powerful requires two things.  First, they need to tell a story.  Second, they need to be put in people’s hands.

Telling Stories

Almost anyone can publish a map or spatial data, or put dots on a map, or create a cool web mapping app.  But today we are seeing a shift to the desire and the need to communicate more effective stories, not the just the data.  We need the rest of the message beyond the data on the map. We need to craft these maps into more useful information products.  Because maps only have power when they tell a story.

A map represents geographic data and includes other features, such as annotation, legends, and popups to help us understand the map.  The next step is adding a new feature to this list: narratives.  We need to turn our maps into storytelling devices.  A map that tells a story doesn’t simply answer a question or solve a problem; it’s a map with a definite purpose, a direction, and a message; it’s a map that can drive action.

Create a map that tells a story, and you’ve created a much more powerful map.  But once you’ve done that, how do you put your map—your story—in the hands of the people that will use it to create a better world?

Power in Your Hand

We often make maps, but are they reaching the right people?  Our colleagues, the decision makers, the public? Others who can collaborate with us?

Maps only have power when we put them in the hands of people.

GIS has traditionally been a back-office technology, and many of the maps created by GIS professionals only reach the hands of a few people.  But all that is changing, and it’s changing very rapidly.

Thanks to the rise of mobile computing, today almost anyone can use your map from practically anywhere.

What is changing is how we put maps in the hands of the people.  Do you remember how maps used to be shared?  You would print out your map on a giant color plotter, roll up the paper map, and hand it to someone.  It wasn’t the most effective way of leveraging the full power of all your hard work.

Today, thanks to advances in computing and geospatial technologies, you have a much wider variety of options available for extending the reach of your map.  For example, you can now put your map in a web app.  Or you can put it on a mobile device.  This evolution is changing the discussion; it’s changing how we interact among ourselves, our organization, and the much larger world.

Power to the People

Gone are the days when information was inaccessible; when our maps were difficult to create, and even more difficult to share.

Be it your coworkers, your constituents, or your fellow world citizens, today almost anyone can use your map from practically anywhere.  They can use it to be more productive, make better decisions, and help others.  They can use it to make the world a better place.

Now that’s what I call power.

We’ve described web maps as one of the key features of ArcGIS Online. We’ve told you how you can create web maps that combine a base map, your own map services, previously published services, and point data derived from spreadsheets. They’re the suite of capabilities that enable maps to be internet-enabled, mashed up, shared, and published while retaining links to data sources. The core of a web map is a small set of instructions that pull together basemaps, services, and other items. They can be widely distributed by embedding them in websites or enabling them on tablets and smart phones.

We added the term “intelligent maps” to emphasize that web maps can do smart things, and that, skillfully constructed, they can be useful and effective information products for a variety of audiences—especially non-technical audiences. In particular, intelligent web maps incorporate elegantly-configured popups that include text, photos, and graphs that help bring geographic data to life. For more on building great popups, see our white paper.

Most recently, we’ve been touting story maps as exemplars of the increasing importance of ArcGIS as a communication platform. My team has been producing story maps to help inspire users to tell their own stories. Our story maps also serve as a sort of public testbed for a variety of map-based functionalities and user experiences.

If our use of these terms has caused confusion, we apologize. To some extent our terminology reflects the fact that our own thinking about maps and storytelling has been evolving. Lately, we’ve been realizing that the differences among these terms are a matter of nuance, and that conceptually it might be better to think of all web maps as storytelling maps.

We’ve been pretty consistent in equating web maps and intelligent maps. How are web maps intelligent? In a couple of key ways, they’re intelligent by default: When you make and save a web map, it’s published on ArcGIS Online as both a map and a description; the details page lists the map contents as server links, and it includes tags or keywords that you’re required to add.

Web maps become more intelligent if you, the map creator, put some effort into them: creating descriptive map names and summaries, being thorough about describing data sources, and, most importantly, designing a beautiful and descriptive map. Just as an uncommunicative person may be perceived as mentally challenged, a map that obscures its message behind poor design choices and needless complexity will not be intelligent, no matter how sophisticated the data it presents.

So a web map becomes “intelligent” through thoughtful editing and design. An intelligent map becomes a story map by being given context and supporting information that makes it understandable and useful as a stand-alone resource. A story map is an integrated set of map(s), related content (legend, text, photos, video, etc.), and functionalities (pan/zoom, pop-ups, swipe, time slider, etc.) that make it a fully functioning information product.

A good example of this process is our recent story map on obesity and diabetes. To produce it, we started with…

A web map: A county map of the U.S. showing rates of diabetes was web-enabled on ArcGIS Online. We worked to enhance the map as an…

Intelligent map: We refined the cartographic design to represent diabetes rates in attractive colors that can be easily interpreted. We used the gray-scale base map to provide enough geographic context to orient the user without unnecessary distractions. We configured the map’s pop-ups to clearly summarize county data with a descriptive sentence and pie chart.

Story map: We added a second map showing rates of obesity, giving context to the diabetes map, and telling a story of potential cause and effect. We edited our title, text, and legends support the story and guide the user. We published the maps into our “swipe” template to enable the user to quickly compare the two maps in an engaging way.

Now that I’ve made such an effort to distinguish among these terms, I’d like to suggest (as has my boss, Clint Brown) that we think about “web maps” as embracing all these concepts. Most of us create web maps because we want to share them—whether it’s with colleagues, friends, stakeholders, or constituents. A shared map is intended to communicate—to tell a story. Some web maps may be rough drafts, or pieces of larger stories. They may be intended for a tiny audience, or a very specialized group. But they’re still intended to communicate.

If we consider ourselves as communicators first, GIS users second…if we want people to understand our work and the issues that motivate us…if we want to make and share maps that make a difference, then…

web map = intelligent map = story map.

It’s hard for me to describe exactly what that something is, but like many of us involved with GIS and geographic information, I’ve always been drawn to and fascinated by maps.

Washington D.C. 1851 map from the David Rumsey collection on ArcGIS Online.

The first map I can recall that really captured my attention was a USGS topo map. Not a digital map, instead it was the paper kind that I’d run down to the local sporting goods store to buy.

These maps had many advantages that are elusive even with today’s best technology. They were portable and I could use them anywhere; I could easily fold them up and stuff them in my pack or pocket. They were perfectly compatible and interoperable with any pen or pencil (and also bright yellow highlight markers). They were great for communication and collaboration; I could mark places of interest and share them later with others, or mail them to far-off colleagues. Between the creases and folds I found not only adventure, but authoritative information that I could trust.

These maps were reliable and never failed, never ran out of power, never needed a plug-in or software update, and they’ve survived the test of time (the map tube in the far corner of my closet is proof). Those torn and dog-eared USGS topo maps are probably why I eventually ended up where I find myself today.

A stone as a work of art (from Wikimedia).

Why do I find maps so appealing? Perhaps it is because I like the power of simplicity, and maps capture information in an understandable, shareable, and simple way. Simple…

Someone, I can’t recall who, once said:

“Stones are simple. But craftsmen with the right tools
can make works of art from stones.”

In many respects GIS maps are our works of art. They capture our knowledge, our tradecraft, and our skills. They enable us and others to gain understanding from disparate data, and understand their relationships.

Simple and effective maps are powerful, and can make the communication of complex things easy. Through simple and effective maps sometimes the most powerful “GIS analysis” can be accomplished intuitively just by viewing one. And like a great sculpture, a great map may be hard to define precisely, but we clearly recognize one when we see one.

Though GIS has changed and evolved vastly over the years in almost unimaginable directions, and converged with other factors like the Web, social media, mobile devices, and the cloud, the map has always been, and remains today, the primary substrate for our work. It’s the canvas upon which our GIS art and craft is painted, and shared with others.

A colleague sent this page from an early overview of the ARC/INFO system, dated April 1, 1982 (by Scott Morehouse):

Captured in that early GIS document is the importance of a map:

A GIS is about making, using, and sharing maps for many purposes, empowering GIS professionals, and often more importantly, empowering anyone to gain geographic knowledge using maps as the delivery vehicle.

Our ability to make, use, share, and communicate using GIS maps has grown exponentially since I purchased my first USGS quad sheet, and since Scott Morehouse documented the ARC/INFO System. Now, many years later, ArcGIS 10.1 and the evolution of ArcGIS Online represent significant mileposts in the history of GIS maps.

These latest steps make it easier than ever before to deliver GIS maps to the Web, to mobile devices, and via the cloud where they can reach a vast audience. This ultimately means that even more people can discover their powerful simplicity, and will agree with me that there’s just something about a good map.

The “Battlefields of the Civil War” map was the latest in an ongoing effort to show how intelligent maps can help users explore subjects over both space and time. We’re also seeking to give users different options for browsing, navigating, and discovering content—even within a single story map.

To build the story, we first created a web map. We compiled a spreadsheet of Civil War battles, using Wikipedia and the Civil War Trust as sources. We geo-tagged the battlefields by tapping POI Factory’s free database of GPS points. And, with the permission of the Civil War Trust, we added links to many of the dozens of beautiful battle maps that grace their excellent website. Finally, we contacted map collector and technologist David Rumsey, who made a period map available to us. (You can see many more of David’s maps in the David Rumsey Map Collection public group on ArcGIS.com.)

We further refined the map by configuring its popups. Web map authors often neglect this key step. ArcGIS Online has an array of options for refining the contents of popups. I find the most versatile to be the “custom attribute display” option (left). This lets you pick and choose among the field names from your spreadsheet in any order you wish, and to apply basic text editing tools, including color, boldface, italics, etc. After a variety of these sorts of adjustments, the web map was a nicely presented collection of useful geo-information.

The web map was ready for its debut. But it needed a stage and a script with which to express its capabilities. In this case the “stage” is a JavaScript app that performs nicely in both browsers and tablets.  We had already developed a “playlist” format that we had used in a story map about American watersheds. JavaScript virtuoso Stephen Sylvia adapted this format to enable a chronological listing of the battles. He also incorporated and refined a search capability that lets users find battles and type in state names, which neatly excludes all battles except those within the featured state.

The trickiest part was perfecting the timeline. Stephen made repeated adjustments, finally achieving an array of options including dragging pointers to manually set date ranges, playing and pausing an animation, and enabling users to change animation settings. The app also lets users choose among basemaps: The default National Geographic map, satellite imagery, and David Rumsey’s 1862 map. A dropdown box displays the map legend and links to sources.

The resulting story map gives users several ways to explore the map: searching, browsing, panning and zooming, adjusting time, and switching theme. It’s interesting to move the time slider or play the animation to reveal patterns of conflict, especially the line of battles along Sherman’s route to Atlanta. It’s also interesting to choose the imagery option, zoom in for a close-up view, and click from battle to battle. You’ll quickly see why the Civil War Trust faces an ongoing challenge: Many of the battle sites are within or near subdivisions and strip malls.

Traditionalists might insist that a story is by nature linear. Written or oral stories are in fact linear narratives. Even stories that jump back and forth in time are written and read in a linear fashion. The mediums of text and the spoken word require it: you can’t tell, read, or listen to a story all at once, or back to front, or at random. It’s at least theoretically possible, perhaps, but doing so makes comprehension difficult.

Geography is essentially non-linear, although components of it are sequential. One travels through a landscape in a linear fashion, just as one can view change over time in a sequence or series of maps. But spatial relationships are complex and multi-dimensional. Confining geographic analysis to two dimensions robs it of much of its richness and texture.

On the other hand, many geography-based stories are linear. A travelogue, the migration of a bird or mammal, an explorer’s route, and the path of snowmelt from mountains to sea are best depicted in narrative form. Which is why we developed our Map Tour template.

We prototyped the template with our “Walk on the High Line” story. Story maps team member Lee Bock, who has long experience with Adobe Flex and Flash, developed it as a Flash application. I took advantage of a business trip to New York to walk the length of the park on a lovely spring day and document it in photos.

We knew from the start, however, that we wanted to create a JavaScript version to enable its use on tablets and mobile phones. The “Walking tour of the National Mall” marked the debut of the JavaScript app. The app, in this case, came before the story, so I chose another sunny day to walk the Mall, camera in hand.

I kept a GPS track using the “Motion-X GPS” app on my iPhone, and after the outing I dragged the resulting .gpx track onto an ArcGIS Online map to create the route. I uploaded my photos to Flickr, and copied the URLs for small (thumbnail) and large versions of each onto a .csv file, into which I added lat-long coordinates (compiled manually by using the “Measure” tool on ArcGIS Online). I also wrote titles and descriptions, and copied them into separate fields on the spreadsheet. The .csv became the basis of the “story points” in the narrative. (The current version of the Map Tour uses .csv files that aren’t incorporated into a web map. An upcoming version will.)

I used the same method during a trip to Esri’s headquarters in Redlands, California to document a walk around campus. The Walking Tour uses a different template we call the “playlist.” It’s less strongly narrative in form, and it places greater emphasis on the map. We’ll be making the playlist template available soon.

The method I’ve described for compiling story maps is fun, but it’s admittedly somewhat tedious, and it involves multiple steps. For that reason, we’re working with Esri’s mobile team to develop an iPhone “Story Builder” app. When the app is completed, subscribers to ArcGIS Online will be able to create and save a feature service as a web map. When they get into the field, they’ll access the web map ID via email. The app will record the GPS track, and any photos, notes, and captions made by the user on his or her device will automatically be added to the feature service.

When the user returns to home or office, the map will be ready to edit and publish on ArcGIS Online. I can imagine myriad uses for this powerful combination of mobile app and web map, for everything from scientific observations to personal travelogues.

You can download the Map Tour template.

So where do maps fit in the storytelling realm?  I recently spoke with Allen Carroll, who left National Geographic about a year ago and is now ArcGIS Online Content Program Manager at Esri, about Story Maps—a new initiative he’s working on with David Asbury, Lee Bock, and Stephen Sylvia to integrate storytelling and maps.

You were Executive Vice President and Chief Cartographer at National Geographic Maps for a number of years.  What led you to Esri?

Allen:  During my time in Nat Geo Maps I became familiar with Esri and was fortunate to become good friends with Jack Dangermond, who was extremely supportive of our efforts. I attended a number of Esri User Conferences, and had the opportunity to work with many people in Redlands and at the DC office. We worked with Esri to enhance National Geographic’s cartographic database, and National Geographic and Esri collaborated to produce the National Geographic MapMachine, which was one of the first interactive atlases on the Internet.

Allen Carroll

I admired the company very much, and was especially excited about its support of non-profits and the fact that ArcGIS enabled creation of vast amounts of exciting and important data. So much of that data begged to be interpreted and distributed to broader audiences. And it still does! So as someone who had been telling stories with maps for many years, the move to Esri was exciting, easy, and a natural extension of my work at Nat Geo.

While you were at National Geographic you were working the Global Action Atlas (which evolved into National Geographic Explorers | Take Action).  One of your current projects at Esri is Story Maps.  Is there a common thread between these initiatives?

Allen:  Absolutely there is. I believe in the power of maps and geography to educate, inform, and inspire people to action. The Global Action Atlas was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate how to use maps to enable people to discover important work being done around the world on behalf of people, cultures, and the natural environment. Story Maps provides a wonderful platform to continue to demonstrate that power. By the way, it’s exciting to see that National Geographic has expanded on the Atlas with their recent launch of the Take Action initiative. I hope that many of our map stories will inform and inspire as well.

What’s the big idea behind the Story Maps initiative?

Allen:  I guess I just articulated one idea: To use maps in new and innovative ways to get people excited and involved in the world. Another big idea is that ArcGIS has been widely embraced as a tool for management, analysis, decision support, modeling, and situational awareness. ArcGIS has huge promise in another arena: communication. Thanks to continuing changes in the Internet, cloud computing, mobile and tablet platforms, and to constant improvements in the software itself, we can now put the power of GIS into the hands of managers, CEOs, reporters, school kids—everyone. The goal of the Story Maps effort is to prove that point, and to enable thousands of GIS users to tell their own stories.

The Story Maps Gallery lets you select a map story, read a summary of how it was made, and comment or ask questions.

What’s the attraction of telling a story with a map?

Allen:  Efficiency is one. Maps are wonderful organizers of information. And they’re an ideal stage on which to spin a narrative. I’ve always loved the way maps tickle both sides of the brain: They invite inspection, analysis, critical thinking—but they can (and should!) also be things of beauty, appealing to our more intuitive, aesthetic impulses as well. So they’re an ideal way to engage people.

What has the reaction been so far to Story Maps?

Allen:  Very good, which is gratifying. But I have to confess that the jury is still out. We’re really just getting off the ground. The proof will come in our ability—knock on wood—to attract a larger audience, and to enable and inspire others to tell stories with maps. So ask me again in a year or so.

What can we look for in the future from the Story Maps initiative?

Allen:  We’re striving to be more relevant and newsworthy. So look for more Story Maps in 2012 that relate to current issues, including the economy, unemployment, the elections, sustainability, poverty, and so on. Not that we won’t have fun every now and then, too. I really do feel we’ve just barely scratched the surface. I hope we can find new and unexpected ways to interact with maps. Tablets provide some especially promising opportunities, of course.

How can people participate in Story Maps?

Allen:  We’d love people’s ideas about new topics, new or hidden data sources, interesting GIS work that begs to be shared with a wider audience. We need people to criticize us too. We also, by the way, want to do more to involve our audiences: to enable users to share their own location information, photos, and opinions. Now that so many of us walk around with location-enabled devices, we should be engaging people in new ways, and recruiting them as authors and contributors to Story Maps.

“Tale of 50 Cities: Unemployment” tells the story of U.S. unemployment geographically.

What other initiatives are you working on at Esri?

Allen:  I continue to help with strategy and content for ArcGIS Online, although limited a bit by both time and distance. We’re working hard to develop maps, apps, and templates that make the benefits and capabilities of GIS available and usable to more people. The rapid evolution of ArcGIS Online, now available for organizations to customize for their own uses, has been exciting to watch, and gratifying to be involved in. The expansion of GIS outward from the realm of the techno-specialists has huge implications that we’re still struggling to fully grasp. One of the pleasures of working at Esri is that the opportunities and challenges are so big, and varied, and constantly changing.

Thanks, Allen!

•    Visit the Story Maps web site
•    Tell Allen about your Map Story
•    Follow Allen on Twitter