On the Google Lat-Long blog I came across a post about Penguin Publishing using Google Maps to help tell the stories of novels they publish. While this a cool concept in general (although not well embraced by all) it got me thinking about how people tell stories with maps.

This is a topic we’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about lately, especially as we’ve done user testing. The advent of the slippy web map, and mashups with it, has introduced a fundamentally new way to tell stories with maps. Historically maps have been set within stories to help illustrate them as with this map of poverty from Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier’s Atlas on Poverty in America.

This construct has fundamentally changed with map mashups where the story is told inside of the map through clickable pushpins instead of around the map. For instance with the Penguin Publishing example they are literally telling the story of Charlie Cumming’s novel The 21 Steps inside of the map.

While the ability to click on a push pin to get more multimedia information about an object on the map has been a wonderful innovation, is it always the best way to convey information to a user? You could go in an entire Tufte tangent at this point, but I’ll try to keep this succinct. When we did user testing we found that especially with non-technical folks they needed external explanation of what the map meant in order to interpret it.

Classically cartographers have placed the story as an inset on the map and then added a bit of flair with pictures (here be dragons) charts and/or tables. I received a cool book on the history of maps called Cartographia for Christmas, and was amazed how constant the story element was to even the most ancient maps up to current times. Check out this map from the Ottoman Empire circa 1560 or so:

No dragons, but plenty of text to tell the story behind the map and pictures to illustrate it. I believe the common theme, whether it is ancient Ottoman maps or a Flickr map mashup, is map tell stories.

I think Peter Turchi summed it up best in his book Maps of Imagination “To ask for a map is to say, tell me a story.” The question is are we telling stories effectively with maps? Is jamming all your map content into a push pin pop up balloon the best way to do it?

Popularity: 21% [?]