Research Guides: GIS for the Digital Humanities: Spatial Storytelling

Spatial Storytelling tools

Spatial Storytelling is a great way to showcase your projects. There are many tools and applications that could help you bring your stories alive using maps and other multimedia together.

In this section you can find easy to use tools to create your own stories and share them in the web.

StoryMap JS
StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events.
You can use tools as timeline and overlaying maps to show your data.
Neatline
Neatline is a geotemporal exhibit-builder that allows you to create beautiful, complex maps, image annotations, and narrative sequences.
Visualeyes
VisualEyes is an HTML5 web-based authoring tool developed at the University of Virginia to weave images, maps, charts, video and data into highly interactive and compelling dynamic visualizations.
Palladio
Palladio is a widely-used web-based tool for visualizing data using networks and maps developed by the Stanford University. You can upload you point data from a csv file and visualize them as a network or on a map.
Historypin
Historypin allows you to create a digital collection of images, audio and text for a local community or for a place. Everything pinned to a place or a point in a map. Resources can be added collaboratively.
ArcGIS StoryMaps
StoryMaps allows you to create your own maps and combine it with text, images and videos to tell stories. You will need an ArcGIS license to use SotryMaps.

Examples

Midwest Time Machine
Midwest Time Machine is a website from the Newberry Library that enables users to see the past through first-hand accounts of different figures. It combines images and interactive maps with letters and diaries. I was built using StoryMaps JS.
Jeddah: Gateway to the Hajj
Is an exhibit created by students of the University of Virginia. It shows the changing modes of travel in three time periods. It shows an interactive map tied to a timeline at the bottom from where you can navigate. Created in Neatline.
Newman to now
The Newman to now project shows photographs taken by Don Newman between 1940s and 1960s and contemporary photographs of the same sites taken by Gary Walpole to explore continuity and change in Memphis built environment. It also shows newspaper articles and interviews. Created in Visualeyes.
Placing Oral Histories
This is a StoryMap created to represent the experience of four different narrators, each of whom detailed their experience of displacement from their homes in Syria through a long-form oral history interview. Made with ArcGIS StoryMaps.
ESRI's collection of StoryMaps and the Digital Humanities
Explore this extensive collection of maps, presentations and visualizations of Digital Humanities projects created with ArcGIS StoryMaps.

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