What are story maps?
Maps have always told stories. They define where we are, who we are and how we think of ourselves.
They can communicate all of this at a glance, and as such are powerful tools for communication and education.
Story maps take data and make it tangible. They can make something abstract feel real and reveal new insights.
The tricky question can be where to start. In this blog, I’ll be examining some of the projects created by our clients, and discussing the different ways in which they choose to create and curate their story maps. I hope that this is useful to anyone embarking on a story mapping project, regardless of platform.
Looking for inspiration? Check out our spatial storytelling resources page.
The Refugee Map
The Wiener Holocaust Library is the oldest dedicated institution to storing archival materials relating to the Holocaust in the world. Their collections contain over a million items.
Their collections database is fantastic for academics and dedicated historians, but the Library wanted to create a more accessible place online for the general public. As many of the documents and entries were related to a space, and the exhibit as a whole focussed on stories of migration, they decided to map the items.
Their original version of the map launched in 2015, but didn’t garner the kind of engagement the Library was hoping for. In 2021, with support from Arts Council England, they launched the new Refugee Map on Humap.
On the Refugee Map, every black pin is a record about an era in someone’s life.
In each record there is text giving a broad overview of this part of the subject’s life and a gallery of primary sources relating to the text. These are often documents, passports, visa applications, school certificates, diaries and family photographs.
Collections on the Refugee Map piece these moments together to create a full account of someone’s life over a period of time. For example, the Lotte Jaslowitz collection begins with her childhood in Romania, her incarcerations in the Ladijin Concentration Camp and the Tiraspol Ghetto, the deaths of her husband and daughter, and ends with the life she built for herself in London as a barrister.
The focus is on individual people and stories. Where possible, the primary images used are photographs of people, often intimate family portraits or grainy candids. The scale of the atrocity of the Holocaust, and its discussion in the abstract, can reduce millions of innocent people to a statistic. By focusing on individual stories, the Refugee Map places the humanity of its subjects front and centre.
The Library also uses overlays to make historical maps of Europe and the world viewable. Layering maps from 1880-1946, you can see the borders of Europe move and shift as wars of unification, expansion, and ultimately the two World Wars and a burgeoning Cold War touch the millions of lives contained within the pen-and-ink illustrations.
In the Refugee Map, the geopolitical and the personal can be explored side-by-side. The overlays add geopolitical context to personal experience, and the personal stories contained within each record make the geopolitical personal.
Learn more about the Refugee Map on their case study page.
Layers of London
Where the Refugee Map is a highly curated and intentional piece of work, the Institute of Historical Research’s Layers of London is both uncurated and uncuratable. Anyone with an email can sign up and add content to Layers, and the story map has over 6500 users and tens of thousands of items, the vast majority of which were created by members of the public.
The others were contributed by partner institutions of the IHR; the British Library, the London School of Economics, and the Museum of London Archaeology to name a few.
Layers is a democracy. A record on the history of the Barking & Dagenham Nandos, written by a school pupil, can exist side-by-side with a highly polished record created by professional.
In both cases, the map is being used to add context to the data it contains.
To use the example of the Barking Nandos, it was a cinema for decades and the building was bombed severely during the Second World War. During the testing for Layers of London, several children in one test class chose to write about it – on the surface it is humorous, but it was clearly a site worth writing about to those pupils.
On Layers, you never know what you’re going to find. There is an entire collection on odd vents in the city, and a group of very dedicated volunteers are trying to map every pub in London.
Because of its crowdsourced nature, Layers of London has also become a popular place for people to share the stories of their community. To use just one example, Everyday Muslim has used a wealth of primary sources and media to map the experiences and impact of London’s Muslim community.
Layers of London also contains a wealth of georectified historical maps, aerial photographs, and spatial data overlays. The area of London has been (more or less) consistently occupied since the Neolithic period and is mostly built on older eras of London. Users can explore maps of archaeological finds, Second World War bomb damage, poverty in Victorian London or London as it was in the reign of Henry VIII. These are old streets, and the map helps us appreciate that sites of contemporary activity – like a Nandos in Barking – meant something very different to the Londoners of days long past.
You can learn more about Layers of London on their case study page.
Tampa Through Time
The University of South Florida’s Tampa Through Time story map is comparatively light on text, relying more on the university’s extensive collections of ephemera, photographs and primary sources to create a feast for the eyes.
Led by Dr Amanda Boczar and with the help of her team, student volunteers, and some community members, thousands of items were mapped against Tampa and the wider Florida area to create a place-based digital exhibition of their traditional collections database.
Many of these records have been organised into thematic collections, on subjects ranging from the African American Experience in Florida to the state’s Mutual Aid Societies.
The content in Tampa Through Time is a mixture of moments of individual lives, family scenes, and everyday life. A menu at a popular Columbian restaurant; a military parade, a schoolyard, a newspaper clipping of a factory – ephemera, lovingly preserved and made cohesive through presentation. Many of the thousands of items on the website are inherently place-based or contain local landmarks, beauty spots, or holiday events. In a database, these are experienced vertically and out of context. On a map, they are almost in situ. You can enjoy them in combination with historical maps (including some of the iconic Sanborn maps) that chart the explosive growth of Tampa through time.
Islington’s Pride
Islington Council’s Islington’s Pride maps queer history and contemporary culture in London’s iconic Islington Borough.
On this map stories of repression live side-by-side with tales of love and liberation, with each record containing a mixture of oral histories, ephemera, and media. Historical accounts and records of lives are juxtaposed with modern stories and media formats, like video or audio recordings. The entire project centres on the theme of presence – there have always been queer people, even if ‘queer’ wasn’t the word used at the time to describe them. There are records from Elizabethan and Stuart England right up to the 2020’s, telling stories of existence, resistance, and community.
At the launch of the project, the records featured in the walking trails could be found via QR code plaques erected around the borough. The use of the QR codes and walking trials embeds the information on the screen in the living space of the city and encourages passersby, with no prior knowledge of the map or perhaps even interest in its subject, to point their phone at it for a split-second and learn about the hidden histories that surround them on the streets of London.
The map was one part of a wider project to highlight and explore LGBTQ+ history and culture in Islington,
You can learn more about Islington Pride on their case study page
