And the Winners Are ....
... Examples of innovative mapping tools that are expanding the art of story-telling, and helping communities build better, more sustainable futures.
For this final newsletter of the year, we highlight a tool we hope is familiar to Our Towns readers—and some uses that are exciting, positive, and new.
That tool is the “StoryMap,” produced by our longtime friends at the digital mapping company Esri. The Esri company, its leaders, and its tools were featured in the Our Towns book and movie. In reports over the years we’ve chronicled the evolution of geospatial information systems—GIS—as applied by Esri and others to a range of public and private challenges. GIS helps cities track services and engage citizens; it helps businesses become more sustainable and efficient; it helps public utilities, public safety officers, and first responders avoid disasters or react when things have gone wrong.
Recently we had the chance to help judge an international competition for StoryMaps. These are web-based applications that use GIS tools to enhance storytelling of all sorts. This competition was sponsored by Esri, and its theme was conservation in the broadest sense of the term. Our Towns decided to sponsor with Esri an award of our own, focusing the conservation theme on citizen-driven, community-based, locally-important stories.
The winners of the Esri competition, including the Our Towns winners, have just been announced, here. Congratulations to them all!
For our winners, Our Towns chose two StoryMaps that impressed us for their compelling storytelling and for their use of GIS technology to convey their stories in newly powerful ways. One winning entry was created by students in the Pacific Northwest, and one came from a civic organization in the Boston area.
If you go to a new post about the competition at the Our Towns site, you’ll see embedded, interactive versions of the winning story maps themselves.
The student StoryMap is “Recovering Lost Crab Pots of the Salish Sea.” It presents the story of crab pots lost and found on the sea floor around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. You can see the interactive version of the map here. The photo at the top of this post shows some of the young people involved.
This StoryMap describes the real and potential damage that lost pots caused to the biodiversity of sea life (and trapped crabs!) and to the economics of the region. It also describes the partnering among people and institutions to design an experimental way to recover the pots, and how they all carried it out.
The strength of this StoryMap is in telling a complex story of science, technology, and human effort, richly illustrated with maps, timelines, underwater videos, survey and data presentations.
We found that for this kind of story, the StoryMap application was a big improvement beyond simple words and pictures. You can read much more about this project here.
The second winner, “A River Interrupted,” tells the story of how old, now-useless dams along the Charles River have inflicted damage and invited risks to water quality, water habitats, fish passages, and neighboring human lifestyles and economies. This StoryMap presents the history and role of the dams, the changes over time, the prospect of exacerbating conditions from climate change, and calls to actions that citizens can take.
Again, the tools of GIS transform a complicated and potentially tedious story into an exciting and dramatic read, in the same way that illustrations can enrich and enliven a book. The maps, videos, sound recordings, timelines, vintage images, before-and-after scenes, quick snapshots and profiles of the plenitude of amazing types of fish drive the storytelling. You can see the interactive map here.
To us, a valuable takeaway from good StoryMaps is their being inviting and accessible to many different kinds of audiences. StoryMaps are not for all subjects or stories; the tools of GIS apply better to some aspects than others. For example, they can shortcut complexities, like the explanations of the crab pot retrieval systems. They can display original perspectives, like what dams meant to Indigenous populations. A picture – or a map, or timeline, or creative graphic, or bit of audio – can be worth 1000 words.
These two StoryMaps are ambitious and well-produced. They are a gold-standard and should encourage other map-makers.
They also introduce possibilities for a new kind of journalism. Story-telling has always involved the interaction of words, images, sounds, multiple perspectives and possibilities. People who told stories in print became more effective when they could include photos, illustrations, graphs and charts, and now video and audio clips. Maps have long been a crucial tool of human communication and orientation. Story-tellers and map-makers like the ones recognized with these awards are showing us new possibilities for conveying messages about our past, present, and shared future.
Please have a look at these two StoryMap winners on our website, here. Holiday greetings to all; thanks for your attention and support; and we’ll be in touch next year.