![]() ![]() ![]() But, are ‘spatial narratives’, ‘story maps’, and ‘visual storytelling’ merely academic buzzwords or company slogans? What can storytelling actually tell us about cartography and design?įollowing Caquard ( 2013), I argue that visual storytelling offers an entry point for hybridization in cartography, illuminating conceptual and epistemological tensions and offering rich new avenues for transdisciplinary research and design. Visual storytelling has transformed the cartographer into a ‘data journalist’ at major news companies, with professional practice outpacing research and education as a generation of cartographer/journalist experiments with new combinations of technology and multimedia, new forms of presentation and rhetoric, and new dimensions of the user experience (Wallace, 2016 Cairo, 2017). Story maps are now a commercial platform, inviting a diverse and non-expert user group to participate in the mapmaking process, to tell their own place-based stories (Kerski, 2015 Buckley and Butler, 2018). Spatial narratives are an emerging research thrust in geography and cartography alike, with scholarship drawing from an eclectic set of disciplines and methods (Elwood, 2006 Caquard and Cartwright, 2014). Energy is surging around ‘spatial narratives’, ‘story maps’, and ‘visual storytelling’ in cartography and related fields, due in part to geoweb technologies that make maps responsive across display devices, personalized to the viewer's content and context, and viral across social media (Haklay et al., 2008 Sui and Goodchild, 2011 Sieber et al., 2016). Stories, like maps, are a method for documenting and explaining, for meaningfully abstracting our experiences, for communicating and sharing, and for asserting a particular worldview. Introduction: cartographic design as visual storytelling? ![]() I conclude with a call for future research on visual storytelling in cartography, including visual design, visual ethics, and visual literacy. I then offer three of potentially many ways to articulate and organize the design space for map-based visual storytelling: foundational narrative elements and their adaptation to geographic phenomena and processes, visual storytelling genres delineating different story experiences, and visual storytelling tropes used to advance narratives across text, maps, images, and other multimedia. I begin by introducing influences on map-based visual storytelling and review ten recurring themes that make visual storytelling different from traditional perspectives on cartographic design. I argue that visual storytelling offers an entry point for hybridization in cartography, uniting technology with praxis, product with process, and design with critique while opening rich new avenues for transdisciplinary research and design. In this article, I review considerations and techniques for approaching cartographic design as visual storytelling. ![]()
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