Why Maps?

What do maps bring to storytelling? I explore this question in the latest in an occasional series on "Maps, Minds, and Stories."

Stories—traditional stories, the narratives of oral history—are inseparable from their cultural context. In fact, they're key in defining and shaping the cultures within which they're created, told, and retold.

Most world cultures have long since moved beyond oral histories as the means by which shared beliefs are preserved and handed down. Stories in this modern, digital age play different roles. They help us parse the endless onslaught of information that we all struggle to manage. They help us discern meaning, to derive understanding, to gain new insights—or simply to be entertained. We hope that story maps, our own modest contribution to the realm of digital storytelling, do all these things.

Maps add extra dimensions to multimedia stories. They pin a narrative to place; they place a story within a larger context; they provide additional, deeper insights.

Maps play roles that other multimedia content just can’t perform. They enrich the multimedia mix, and they provide an additional means of connecting to audiences. Maps are capable of conveying an immense amount of information with unparalleled efficiency, revealing patterns and relationships that photographs, video, and text are incapable of portraying.

Maps perform a variety of functions within a story. (For a slightly different take on how maps "perform" within stories, see my earlier story, " Maps in Dramatic Roles .")

Their simplest function is to provide location; to anchor a narrative to a place. Example: the weekly  "Fridays on the Farm"  story maps (example above) from the Natural Resources Conservation Service always begin with a locator map.

The next step up is to depict a series or collection of locations. Story Map Tours, like this one of  Palm Springs , locate a series of items on a single map. Understanding the distance and orientation of one point to others in the narrative provides additional richness and context. It’s not just “dots on a map.”

Thematic maps—singly, and especially in series—can parse a complex tapestry of categories and relationships. Example: classifications of protected lands in  The Lands We Share . Maps presented in series can illuminate issues and threats, such as the Rohingya refugee camp maps showing location and density of shelters compared to threats from landslides and floods in  this story  by the UN refugee agency.

Maps can vividly compare one place to other places, and they can show change over time.  The Age of Megacities  does both, comparing the world’s largest urban areas and showing their growth over several decades. Comparing the explosive growth of Lagos, Nigeria, to the gradual expansion of Paris provides insights about urban history and population dynamics.

Sometimes a spatial analysis can form the centerpiece of a story map. By locating senior centers and polling places in the Richmond, Virginia, area and plotting walking times,  Let Seniors Vote  by the Democracy Labs shows how distance from polling places can hamper participation in elections by elderly people.


For centuries maps have performed a pleasurable function: enabling leaps of the imagination. We’ve all (I hope!) run our fingers across a map and imagined what it’s like to actually experience a place or to travel along a route. Interactive maps combined with visuals can replace those vague mental images with real ones, bringing places vividly to life. It’s literally the next best thing to being there.

Combining maps with photos and videos can come almost as close as is possible to providing the whole picture, to filling the whole storytelling spectrum. Adding audio can make the experience even more immersive. An example is  Sounds of the Wild West , within which environmental sounds accompany images of Montana’s natural landscapes. (We did some one-time customization to incorporate sound into this story.)


We at Esri love maps. But we’ll admit that, for all their informational power, they can be rather distant and impersonal. Rarely has a map brought someone to tears (unless it’s a really ugly map!). Images and videos, however, can pack a potent emotional punch. That’s an important reason why maps and images make such an effective combination. Maps provide the setting and are rich with information; visuals play to our emotions.

Our  "Front Lines of Famine"  story included an animated map of drought conditions. By themselves, the moving blobs on the map are abstractions. The accompanying photographs lend meaning to the blobs, and remind us of the sometimes devastating impact of drought on human lives.

It can be challenging, however, to create a unified narrative and visual consistency with elements that are as disparate as maps, photos, videos, and infographics. To counter this, our team strives to create user experiences that are simple, elegant, and consistent. Within individual stories we often develop a visual vocabulary—through use of color palettes, fonts, and rhythmic structural elements—that creates what I like to think of as "a little world." We’ll often match cartographic color treatments with the color palettes for type and graphics within the story itself. That has the effect of subduing the visual contrast among different media types.

Sometimes—often, in fact—less is more. Serial story mapper Elizabeth Della Zazzera created an elegantly understated story that is embedded in the website of Lapham's Quarterly. This  virtual tour  of the life of Harriet Jacobs, a freedwoman and abolitionist who published a memoir in 1861, employs largely monochromatic maps in combination with a custom type font that evokes the period. The story whispers rather than shouts, but grabs our attention all the more effectively as a result.


Within the physical confines of a book or magazine, stories have a natural “home” or context. Printed materials are tactile. They have heft and texture; they have distinctive smells; they’re connected to their physical environment. Conversely, light-emitting screens divorce themselves from their real-world surroundings. They defy external light sources. They demand our attention more aggressively than printed materials. As a result stories presented on digital platforms often feel oddly isolated, constricted, and out-of-context.

This might be a personal prejudice resulting from a lifetime of cartophilia (loving maps, that is), but it's my feeling that integrating maps into a digital narrative can reunite a story to the world, albeit in a very different way. Maps can and do provide the context—the stage—on which a story and its characters perform.

Now that we've settled the question of why maps, let's look inside our skulls to see how our brains perceive space and "draw" their own maps:


In addition, you're welcome to explore the other stories in this series: