Esri - Smithsonian StoryMaps Webinar

[Music] welcome everybody this is the uh esri's uh story map workshop um dealing with your introduction to story maps as well as including three presentations from storytellers from the smithsonian this is open to anyone from museums gardens and zoos elsewhere as well so we're expecting quite a few participants anyway i'm going to hand it over to alan carroll now he's the head of the story maps team at esri and oop dan we just lost you but i think you've pretty much finished your introduction anyway good afternoon everybody it's it's great to uh great to have you here it looks like they're about almost 180 people which is really exciting probably most of them from smithsonian uh but uh but hopefully some from others from uh museums aquarium etc across the country and maybe the world i founded the story maps team at esri about 10 10 years ago and by the way my wife has worked at the center for folk life and cultural heritage at the smithsonian for something like 35 years so i feel very at home today i'm going to go ahead and share my screen and jump right into things just a second are you seeing what's the story map yes we can see it alan great okay just want to make sure um so uh what's a story map story maps uh work on the web of course and they combine interactive maps that is maps that are created often but also hosted on esri's cloud resource arcgis online with multimedia content so your photos and videos and audio and text of course to tell stories about the world and the world i truly mean the world so every topic under the sun every scale from uh neighborhood all the way up to uh planet wide they work on a variety of screen sizes so in other words they're responsive and work just as well on mobile devices and tablets as they do on pcs it's best to author story maps on big screens but they work on all sorts of screen sizes and then to me the big secret of story maps is that they incorporate interactive builders so you don't need to know any kind of coding or html html or css anything like that you use a block palette which will show you a little bit later on in this session to essentially create building blocks and create add and arrange and rearrange building blocks to to put together a beautiful multimedia story esri hosts uh your story maps um in that same cloud service arcgis online we don't claim any kind of ownership it's simply a place for that that content to uh to be hosted and made accessible but via all sorts of means some of you might be familiar with what we now call our classic apps we started about eight or nine years ago uh creating what was then what became a series of separate web apps which each of which combined i'm sorry each of which presented a different way of combining maps and multimedia content but about three four years ago we decided we needed to go to the next level and so we we created uh arcgis story maps that has many advantages among them is that within this single builder now you can find user experiences that that are very similar to in some ways better than and different than the uh the classic stories so we urge you to uh to try and work with arcgis story maps we've had a very exciting run over the last decade it's been a real thrill to see story maps just take off we're now actually starting to approach a million and a half stories i think we're above 1.4 million stories hosted on our gis online plus tens to perhaps hundreds of thousands more that we can't count that are behind firewalls or within enterprise systems um many many different organizations are using storymaps among them some of the largest conservation uh and humanitarian organizations federal agencies are using story maps very broadly especially epa and noaa each of which has several hundred story maps national park service usgs other federal agencies international ngos and of course smithsonian institution to uh to an increasing extent and you'll get to see a couple of examples of that also my alma mater national geographic is using some story maps i was at netgeo for 27 years before i came over to esri another thing that's been really exciting to us that's happened more or less organically is that they've really taken off in the education space and that teachers are assigning students story maps as an alternative and we think a more engaging alternative to traditional research papers and so now this number of student-produced story maps is outstripping all the others combined at least by one count recently we'll talk more about where to go for information but the basic starting point is esri.com story maps uh but before i move on i'm going to give a little bit of advice about storytelling so it's one thing to learn the builder but it's quite another thing of course to become adept at storytelling itself like any creative medium story maps can be used clumsily it can be used elegantly and given our experience over the years in storytelling with maps and the fact that we've we've observed hundreds of stories that have been produced by our growing user community these are some a few bits of advice that we think will you'll find useful so maybe step zero which i don't i don't mention here is that the first things you should think about of course are what are the story what's the story you're going to tell what's the main point you want to get across and who is your main audience so those are really the basic things upon which you start to conceptualize and build a story but once you've done you've done that rather than just hastily throwing together a story it's good to think about these uh few items of course i could come up with 90 steps to great storytelling but these are a few of the ones that we think might be most useful and important so first is to start with a bang try to come up with an evocative title and a beautiful opening image and hopefully those can work work off one another sometimes the story can start with no image at all but we like the this idea of an alluring image or a looping video like this one so this could have been just something like protecting making sure our skies stay dark at night but the stewards of the night with this beautiful video clip just resonates i think with readers and it's a more attractive way to lure them into a story here's another example in search of refuge with this beautiful photograph of refugees marching across uh looks like a levy or something but at any rate again rather than just a label it's got a an active verb which we like to use not all the time but when appropriate uh a nice pairing of word and image second is to add a hero and by that i mean a couple of things one is that people love people and if you can populate your story with real people you're more likely to engage readers you can you can feature a single person or a group of people a community uh maybe even a non-human uh hero but i'll get to that in a second so a wonderful example of a people story map is this one by the grand canyon trust called the voices of grand canyon where they uh interviewed and featured um several uh uh people from from american indian tribes in the area of the grand canyon and uh so those people talk about how the importance of their the canyon to their cultures and it's a very fresh and moving way of looking at a very familiar landmark i'm a long time bird watcher so i'm i have a weakness for stories about birds but this one and a sister story about another shorebird were particularly effective in that they they follow the journey of a sandpiper this tiny little bird that flies among other things for four days and four nights non-stop from i believe the uh coast of new jersey down to the northern coast of south america and they so they feature the miraculous flight of and and life history of this bird but then it's it's really just a technique in order to identify stop-over points along that bird's migration route and the conservation efforts that are underway to protect those those key stop-over points third uh trick is to uh think about and to give your story rhythm so the idea here is and it doesn't necessarily apply to every story but often a story will involve as a series of locations or a series of related phenomena and often i find myself working to take advantage of that and provide a sort of repeating structure um which people can quickly become familiar with and becomes a sort of comforting uh regular rhythm to a story that i think can can increase its accessibility so a story i worked on on religious sites and pilgrimages uh lent itself well to that so each section about each of the world's five major religions start with starts with a we hope an attractive image then goes on to a large format kind of vertically oriented map that sort of evokes uh the map itself kind of evokes a uh pilgrimage and then on to more detailed comment an essay that's illustrated with additional photographs so we did that again for each of the five major religions and i think it made for a successful narrative here's another example about wealth divides so we just took a relatively simple concept but we took a map of a nationwide map of median income household median income and pointed out in several in a half dozen or so u.s cities how within a mile or so less than a mile sometimes just a few blocks like here of the upper east side of new york you can go from very high some of the highest median household income levels to levels that are below the poverty line it's something that we're all familiar with but to see it see that pattern repeated across cities and to see it so starkly portrayed in uh in maps is is perhaps a way to drive home are continuing in a worsening problem with with income inequality uh next is to create a little world uh and i by that i mean to uh to try to both in terms of the editorial style but especially in terms of design elements to try to kind of tie your story together so it's kind of easy to take a graph and make a picture of it and throw it into a story but and it but it takes a little extra work but worth the work that we think is worthwhile to then restyle that graph to match the look and feel of your story that you're the graph and other elements to create a really unified effect and that way all these disparate elements photos videos static maps dynamic maps animations etc all start to feel like part of a whole sometimes that means you can really often we i think it involves simplification so here's a story that looks simple but it's obviously been very carefully thought out about menhaden and they've they decided the authors decided to make everything black and white except for these kind of red accent markings and to give it a kind of informal handwritten style and the result is just a really beautifully unified and and really attractive narrative our team worked on a story called the two koreas this was back when when korea was in the headlines and things were kind of heating up there we decided to give a kind of historical context so for this story we came up with red obviously representing north korea a sort of blue gray representing south korea and we used that theme to uh and ran it through the whole story not just in terms of maps but also infographics and we also use the kind of split screen effects so that we juxtapose north korean images and graphics on the left and south on the right so again the the result is a really seamless uh kind of elegance that uh that we thought thought was pretty successful um this is now made a lot easier with arcgis story maps and even since i did this story we've added a significant enhancement so within a so-called design panel which you'll see again later in this session you can choose among uh six pre-cooked themes so with a single click you can change the font pairings the background color accent color and other graphic elements like quote blocks etc so that it kind of automatically gives your story this kind of graphic unity but we have a new feature that allows you to further customize and create your own themes create and save your own themes which you can then apply to to your own stories so again this can be used to help establish a mood but it can also help with making your story more consistent with your organization's brand number five one size doesn't fit all and by that i simply mean those screen sizes that i talked about a little while ago so um as somebody who used to work as a graphic designer back in the print realm and era the one thing i could take it uh take for granted was the size of the page that i was designing for but of course with the web people are looking at your story on all sorts of screens at different aspect ratios and resolutions so you need to build your story with that in mind our builder has a really elegant preview function so that any time you're authoring your story you can see how it's going to look on on mobile devices and tablets as well as large screens and we urge you to use that regularly and to think about how your media media is going to work how your your whole narrative is going to work in those different sorts of contexts by the way story maps we we work very hard to kind of optimize our media for those different screens so that say on a small cell phone you're not wasting time loading a very large image we automatically kind of size down and send out the images that are appropriate to the device that a reader is using this is a different way of thinking big and thinking small or thinking uh you know large large or tiny the the idea here is instead of physical size is to think about macrocosm and microcosm this is using one of our classic apps but it's a story that our team worked on a few years ago called the cost of beef obviously and the idea was to help point out to people that beef is uh might be delicious but it's also quite expensive in terms of uh in terms of environmental cost so we worked with a group at the university of minnesota called institute on the environment which had published a series of really good maps of showing worldwide distribution of beef i'm going to show you this really quickly because i think we have time so here's the the macro look so we're looking at global patterns of beef consumption and production but then that that's informative and interesting and of course we see how the united states is a world leader in in this perhaps slightly dubious area but to to bring it to life we come right down to the local level so here's a herd of cattle around a watering station we go to feedlots and see these enormous areas where beef are being fattened for the slaughter with their kind of open cesspools of excrement you can only imagine what that smells like and then go to dodge city kansas which is historically a beef center uh see that it's huge feedlot there zoom in on the feedlot to see more lagoons but also zoom in on this is essentially a slaughterhouse and you can see the industrial scale of this beef operation that kind of drives home and sort of unifies the idea of this far away look and a more close kind of examination moving on to number seven use active and passive maps a dirty little secret is that you can publish story maps with no maps at all but we love maps and hope you will use them and there are lots of forms of course maps can take we all kind of assume at least on our team we start by assuming maps are going to be interactive but we also really like and increasingly like static maps because we realize that despite the uh the you know the ability to interact with maps it's not always needed or appropriate and that that that people panning and clicking and zooming can be kind of a distraction and a lot of people don't bother to so don't forget static maps as a great storytelling device because you're able to to to give your readers the exactly the information you want them to have without fear of their becoming distracted arcgis story maps now has a a beautiful way of creating simple maps called express maps that we're going to demo later in the in this session i believe at least briefly number eight might be obvious but not necessarily to everybody so to keep it short and sweet so the web is not a medium that people like to sit for hours and read long form text for the most part stories we've seen stories that get awfully long and perhaps people who really really love glen canyon will be willing to go through the 100 essentially chapters of this story but we think that's probably excessive and so if when we uh or sometimes on the opposite direction which is to take spaceports and just just choose seven of them around the world even though there are quite a few more these days and then finally we feel it's really important to to make a call to action so every story ought to end up with something to do whether it's just a link to more information or better yet like this story from protect our winners providing an array of things you can do from writing your your congress person to uh contacting the organization to donating to volunteering etc so with that quick tour of a few pointers i'm going to turn it over to um to liz who's my colleague and a very special multimedia specialist on our team thanks very much thanks alan okay i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and i'm gonna give you a demo into arcgis story maps and our builder and the first thing i'm going to do as alan mentioned is go to esri.com storymaps and when this loads it will take us into our product home page so here you can find a high level overview of what arcgis story maps is you can also go to this little explore stories tab and see what stories we're reading and this is a curated gallery of information that changes every week and the team contributes to it you can also go to this resources tab which is my absolute favorite part of this page because it has incredible different stories and tips about storytelling best practices transferring over from classics to arcgis story maps how to start your story and it also has a pretty robust overview of what's new with arcgis story map so everything we've updated in the last release and also has blogs and any sort of webinar presentations that the team has been doing thus far and now i'm going to go ahead and launch the builder and i'm going to do so by going over and clicking this blue button in the upper right hand corner that says launch arcgis story maps and as you can see it's popped me right into my story's home page i did that because i'm already logged in and so if you're not logged in already it will prompt you to log in and then it will bring you to a general page where you kind of see all the different stories that you have published or that you're working on as you can see i have quite a few different stories definitely a lot of demo stories um and they're all in different forms so this story over here titled ice is in draft format which means i haven't published it and everything is completely unpublished and i can change everything on the back end uh this story that says introduction to storytelling is published and that's indicated by this turquoise card up in the right hand corner and that means that anything i do in the builder with this story i'll have to republish it again because it's already open to the public on whatever sharing setting i've already designated and then my third card here says unpublish changes which is one of my favorite newer features we have which means that all features that or changes that i make in the back end of the story will be saved until i choose to make it public and that's really great if you have a story that you need to consistently uh update and keep evergreen but for this part of the demo i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to create a new story and i'm going to do that by clicking this button when i click the button it offers me a few different options i can start from scratch or i can use one of our quick start templates and these quick start templates will provide you kind of a pre-baked option with one of our immersive blocks already in it and it's just a really nice way to jump start your storytelling process but for now i'm going to go ahead and start from scratch and now we're launched into the builder right and so as you can see i'm immediately prompted to make a hopefully engaging title but for right now i'm just going to have to go for demo which is definitely not the greatest you'll want to be more creative with yours and i'm going to go ahead and add a cover image and so i went ahead and created a folder of different demo imagery and i'm going to go ahead and choose this photo of ice that i absolutely love and as you can see when it loads i can have a nice iceberg for my cover but it's not really showing most of the iceberg so maybe i want to move down the focal point of this image or since i'm still not really happy with that i can click on design at the upper upper right hand side of my corner or the sidebar at the top and i can choose either side by side or an immersive cover which i really love and i can move my text up and down but in this case i want it up in the sky so it's not blocking the placement of my iceberg and i can go back into my design panel and i can change the theme if i want and so the theme changes the color or the text the accent colors as well and we have these three different or sorry six different custom pre-baked options that are optimized for accessibility for visual accessibility or i can go into a new option which we released in september called theme builder by clicking manage and build my own custom theme and so when i do that we are launched into another window and you can see different themes that i have right now we're going to take a look at this antarctica theme that fits really nicely with my iceberg photo and i can go over here and see you know what my story header in this case it's going to be white any kind of accent colors that i've designated in this case i went in and i picked different hex codes from pictures of ice that i had so they all accent each other well but provide enough contrast to be visually accessible i can look at the the text that i'm using here right now i'm just using one straight text all the way through but some people like to mix and match different text formats a quick note in terms of accessibility sans serif fonts are generally more visually accessible than sarah's fonts but it's truly up to you i can change the button so what the button looks like if i want it round or just having a little more rounded edges i can take a look at quote styles right and i can change how the quotes look i'm definitely a fan of this one though and i can also go in and change my separators to make them look different and then the last thing i would do if i was making this for you know a real story i would go ahead and upload a logo so you'd want to have your organization's logo here and it would pop up in the upper left hand of your header but for now i'm just going to go back to my demo i'm going to click browse themes and i'm going to apply antarctica and as you can tell we now have the font that i specified and we have this nice blue background here and as we go into the the body of the story i can open up the builder and the block palette in particular as alan mentioned and note that it's broken down into four main components we have the text at the top here and we have our graphics which are buttons and separators our multimedia categories so that's going to be your images your videos your audio and your maps and then we have our immersive blocks like slideshow swipe sidecar and map tour at the moment i'm actually going to go back into my stories because i've pre-configured a story that'll help us get through this demo a little more quickly today and so i'm going to go up and i'm going to click edit story we have the same theme the same cover image and we're just going to go ahead and get started with arcgis story mouse so the first thing i want to walk you through is the different text so i'm going to type some out this is text i know i have a way with words that's why alan hired me i can make it a title heading i can make it show up as a subheading i can also make it a bullet or a list in this case let's go for a bullet if i wanted to make this test text stand out i could make it bold or italicize it or even change the colors for one of those kind of frosty accent colors i told you about in theme builder and then i could add another bullet or i could go down and start another text thing and say hey you know this is a quote a beautiful quote very compelling and i can go ahead and attach the quote feature to that and so this kind of pulls the reader's attention to this particular line of text it also provides some space in my story and it's a really great visual indicator the next function i want to talk to you about are the graphics so like i mentioned those are going to be your buttons and your separators the first thing we're going to do is we're going to add a separator which i've been using already in this story to delineate when i'm starting or stopping a section and this is just a really nice visual indicator to your reader that you're moving on or transitioning topics and then i can also add a button so alan mentioned this really cool call to action so in this case i've gone ahead and added in a button and i've typed in learn more and i can go over to the smithsonian and say hey i want you to learn more and paste that link in there and now anybody who clicks the button will be redirected to the smithsonian's home website and so hopefully they will indeed learn more there the next portion of this demo we'll take a brief look at multimedia so i mentioned this is kind of this middle palette in the block palette and so i'm going to go ahead and add an image i'm of the opinion that most ice is definitely not complete without penguins so i'm going to go ahead and add a picture i took of some penguins because who doesn't love penguins and i have the option of making this medium-sized or larger and i can even make it fall in line to the left of my text which is great if i don't want my image to dominate anything but in this case i think i want it small and just to kind of fall in line with the main body of the story and i think would also be super helpful if i added in some audio because i don't know how many people have had the option to hear uh penguins but penguins are pretty loud and so i'm gonna go ahead and add some some penguin noises here and while that loads [Laughter] now people get to hear exactly what it seems like when you're sounds like when you're surrounded by penguins it is an overwhelming experience and and literally literally every meaning of that word uh they're very cute but they're also very loud and i would say kind of smelly uh but i won't hold it against them and so now that we have our image we have our audio if i had a video of penguins i would go in and i would add it the exact same way but instead i'm going to go ahead and show you how to add in a map to your story so to go into the map i open up the block palette and i click on map you kind of have three different ways to do so uh you can choose from your maps right so these are maps that you have in your arcgis online content in this case i have a survey map some maps of iceberg locations going with the theme i can also take a look at living atlas maps which is going to be full of authoritative data sources so i can search icebergs or temperature here and i have access instantly to thousands of incredible maps that i can use and just put instantly in my story but in this case i'm actually going to add an express map which is one of my favorite things about arcgis story maps and that is the ability to kind of add in information quickly and really really nicely so i'm going to go ahead and take a look um very close this is the antarctic peninsula and i'm going to go ahead and drop drop a point on the map right so this is kind of or this is this is very close to where ushuaia is and so i'm going to go in and add an image of a sea lion that i took there and you know we have feathered friends so maybe this is a furry friend um and so now we have a point on the map which was the start of my journey i'm going to go in and i can add a line and so i want to start near uh the end of south america and maybe go over to somewhere on the antarctic peninsula you know i didn't go through that island so i'm gonna go ahead and i'm going to maybe curve the line i don't know if that was the exact trip path we took but it's close enough and then i want people to know that this was indeed a journey so this is our path i cannot spell today but it's a monday so we'll blame it on that and we'll go ahead and make sure everybody knows that this was the path we took and in a few in a few quick sentences in seconds we have an express map ready to be added to the map it's not the prettiest but you get the idea it's really quick beautiful cartography and for all of my cartography nerds out there you can even add arrows to your express map and in our desktop software that dex definitely takes more than a few seconds so i really appreciate this feature the next thing i can add in the multimedia section are embeds so i can embed different information so i have this site of antarctic base map layers i'm going to go ahead and click embed and when you embed web content you have the option of doing it one or two ways you can create an iframe code which allows you to customize different parameters so specify the width and the height and different rules or you can just paste the urine url in directly which is what i'm going to go ahead and do so i'm going to go in and add that base map uh site and as you can see it pops up in this really nice car when you embed something you can either embed it in a card view or an interactive view and so i can change this around and see what i want i think it's a little overwhelming to have this an interactive view so i'm going to move it back to card view and we're going to go ahead and jump into the special blocks now and so these are your immersive blocks your slideshow your spike your sidecar and map so the first block we're going to take a look at is slideshow and slideshow offers a really nice immersive experience you can add images or videos or maps and it's really media focused so i'm going to go ahead and add in actually i'm not going to add in that picture i'm going to add in a picture of a very large iceberg that i saw on my trip and i already know that i don't like where this slide title is panel so i'm going to drop it down and maybe i'll drop it down some more and i can say you know this is ice and i don't love the the color of the panel so i'm going to make it transparent the next thing i'm going to go ahead and do is i'm going to add another slide to this and so we're going to add another image and you know i want people to know that antarctica isn't just ice and penguins although they're important parts of of the area it's not just everything so here is a picture of a snowy mountain and i could add some more information saying you know this is a mountain and i don't love that placement so i'm going to go ahead and move it all the way over to the right hand side and now my reader can go ahead and scroll through this horizontal or vertically and this is does a really great job of breaking up uh scroll fatigue so if your reader's moving through something a lot moving through a lot of information vertically adding in a a slideshow allows them to interact with something horizontally and it's really great the next feature i want to talk to you about is swipe and so swipe is one of my my favorite options you can add in images or you can add in web maps in this case i'm going to go ahead and add in a picture of ice again but i also have an image of it in black and white and i'm going to use swipe to show the difference between the image in black and white and color but swipe is generally really great for showing changes over time or looking at before and after photos and it's one of my favorite really interactive features because who doesn't love to just kind of toggle back and forth and look at differences the next immersive block we're going to talk about is map tour and so map tour offers you two different options you have your guided tour which readers can move through a set of points that you specify in sequential orders or explorer tour which allows readers to interact with points at their leisure guided tour is really great if you want to take people on a specific journey but exploratory is incredible for larger data sets where your reader might get a little tired just endlessly kind of clicking through different points on a map and instead has the option to move through it as they would would as they did on their own free time and then it prompts me to choose you know do i want a map focused or media focused again i tend to think that i have some pretty good pictures so i'm going to choose media focus and now i have a media focus guided tour on the map uh the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to move over towards when my map loads we're going to go back to the antarctic peninsula and i'm going to drop a point somewhere here and turn on a custom zoom level so that it stays and add this location to the map i'm going to go ahead and add an image and i have this image of a photographer i'm taking some some actually i guess it's a videographer here uh taking a video of a penguin colony so i'm gonna go in and add that and i could add in you know some text right so this is a video although this is actually a picture and then i can go ahead and i can add another point on the map um and so when i add this location i'm going to instead of just dropping a point i'm going to search for something and i'm actually going to look up lock roy um and lock roy antarctica it's port lock roy and it's actually the southernmost post office i'm going to turn on my custom zoom level again and add this location to the map and when i was at port lock roy i had a really great opportunity to see a baby penguin so i'm going to add in another feature an image and say this is a baby penguin and when it loads um you know my reader will be jumped back and forth between points on this map so from the top the tip of the antarctic peninsula down to la croix and see different media as we go the last thing i want to move you through uh is sidecar and sidecar is one of my favorite options as well basically they're all my favorite i absolutely love working with arcgis story maps but sidecar is great for kind of expanding on your narrative in really complex ways so you can have a floating panel that's more immersive and it's great for different maps or you can have a docked panel which is incredible if you want to add in additional infographics and a lot of text i'm going to choose a docked panel and we're going to add some text here this is more text and then i'm actually going to go ahead and i'm going to add in a map and i'm going to take a look at historic iceberg locations um if this will load um but you know the thing with with sidecars is while you have your media um i guess i guess my scene isn't going to load today but so we won't actually add a map but i can add in media or a map and in this case i can add in another image but it is you know i haven't really talked about whales there's a lot of whales in antarctica so we'll add in an image of whales but say i wanted to talk about whales on the right with this image i could also add in another complementary image on the left or any other graphic talking about different whale populations there but for now i'm actually gonna scroll down to the end because i know i have to hand this over to ross and well actually to alan and dan and so the first the last thing i want to remind you is always make sure you're adding an attribute attribution at the end of your story so in this case i didn't record penguins while i was there but i did take all the photos that were used in this demo and so i credited myself for a penguin picture but i also added in the proper attribution for the audio and i'm going to give a huge thank you to ellen and also to ross who will give another demo later and to our incredible smithsonian storytellers and with that i will hand it over to alan and dan to introduce our next speakers dan why don't you take it away okay our first speaker uh will be uh kayla um walters who's the living collections manager for smithsonian gardens and she's going to be showing several stories and discuss her experience using uh storymaster for the gardens so go to it kaylee thanks dan and my boss is actually the manager i'm the cataloger of living collections um so my name is kaylee i work at smithsonian gardens and i took my first course in how to use story maps in january and published my first one in mid-march so you can pretty quickly get started with story maps my first story map i worked on um well actually let me take you through the thought process behind what i do when i'm making a story map don't eat that up right now um because i find that's often the hardest place to get started so i have some beautiful slides for you my first question i ask myself is what do i want to say so basically what is the core most basic idea of what i want to say in my story and i can expand out from there later get more complicated and after that who do i want to say it to who's my audience and then what do i need and this is a very exciting part where we get to make outlines um which is more exciting when they're being used for practical purposes than when you're making an essay in middle school um so for my first story map um the cherry blossoms of smithsonian gardens was actually my most popular one as well which was surprising because it was my very first test of how to use this um so my thought process in this one was um what do i want to say basically that cherry blossoms are very beautiful um that smithsonian gardens has several types of cherry blossom trees and also give people a relaxing atmosphere because that's always been part of the enjoyment of cherry blossoms and then i thought who is my audience people who enjoy cherry blossoms and what do i need i need images of the flowering trees and then the flowers themselves some text a quick map and or maps or other and some imagery so i started just by writing some flowery text no pun intended about the history of cherry blossoms i found some images from the freer collection um and then put a beautiful large cherry blossom photo in there because people want to see the cherry blossoms pretty quickly and so i um start featuring the trees and this actually okay we'll go with that um there'll be an image of the full tree overall on this side and then it let me just refresh this sometimes um when doing things live there's a bit of a glitch but that's always fine um so this is a beautiful overall shot of the tree we have from documenting our living collection i put a close-up flower here and i used sidecar for this um so that i could feature a close-up and far away wrote some text and then we always want to point people back to our site our living collection site where each of these trees is documented so i have a nice button in there that will bring people to our record um and they can explore the rest of our tree collection from there if they like um so i did this for each of our varieties of trees and when this first came out it was the beginning of the pandemic unfortunately so they didn't want us to feature maps really heavily in it but once we reopened i at the very end was able to put our map back in which i had loaded for you but now is reloading which has all of our flowering cherry trees on our campus listed for you um and at the end i just put a nice flower reporter and gave attribution to our photographer the next story map i'll show you is what i made for when we did reopen um and so what i want to say with this one is basically we're open which is very exciting um and since this came out in the beginning of july it's very hot i also want to remind people that you can go outside and enjoy the gardens even if it seems like it's sweltering outside it'll still be enjoyable to be outside i thought of my audience as the general public and i knew that i would need beautiful pictures in the summer with good id for the plants so for instance i made sure i got ids on all these and a few quick maps for express maps so for this one i put an express map in here of the walking tour people be going on so they have a general idea of what they'd be seeing and i was able to make this in maybe 15 minutes so it was very nice to just be able to put that in there um i put in a picture that included a face covering because i want to let people know that was what would be doing with the gardens now and then a lovely uh bike parked in the gardens and this one i used the content block of a guided tour um because i thought it'd be really nice to have this map in the corner but then a real focus on the beautiful imagery of the garden um and for this one i actually tested a few different formats to see which would fit best and i settled on this one um even though you do have to click to the side to see the tree because it just made the tour seem more compact so it's fine to test a few different options and i put links in here that again link back to all of our tree records and so this one i'll go through a bit more quickly and i'll also show you that a nice option is you can um include attribution on several photos now so if you click on this little icon you can see this photo was taken by this particular person and i go to the next one i can see we have a different photographer here because it's very important for us to give attribution to all of our photographers you can see lovely roses for this one and so i've really used the story maps more simply but still in the way that's very effective as walking tours to guide people through our living collections um and then i just finished this one off with some more imagery at the end it's quite a long walking tour if you do the whole thing so it's nice to break it up into sections as well and i thank people for coming to the gardens um give them some links to our webinars or social media and end it with a nice photo of a hummingbird and then for my last one i've done most recently fall foliage of smithsonian gardens it's another walking tour because that works quite well for us um and i thought for this one um what do i want to say i want to say that we have beautiful fall trees and you should look outside and identify them if you can kind of to eliminate plant blindness um i my who i want to say this to is a general public who like trees and then what do i need i need images of fall trees some maps and i really want to feature a map at the end of our like trees which are the situation change color for the fall so i included some lovely images in this and i was very excited for this one to get to use the slide feature and feature our american elm at the natural history museum which is the oldest in our collection going through a summer to fall transition just because that's beautiful i put another quick map in here but i just put to the side and then i just went on another walking tour through the collection um one of the things that i want to show in this which i really enjoy since we know a lot of people are going to be looking on this on mobile um you can you would even move this bar you can preview what all of these are going to look like on different devices which they showed earlier earlier so you can see on a mobile how things are going to be laid out um and if i need to like recenter a photo so it appears nicer on a phone i can do that um same on a tablet i can look at how this is all laid out here i can turn it if i like in case someone's holding their tablet this way um and then again go back to a computer and i just click on edit store again to go back into my store and at the very end of this as i mentioned i included a map of our fall trees my internet's a bit slow here right now but this is just the life of working from home um and i worked with our arborist to have a view of this map here which is only of our fall trees and color code that to the color they're likely to turn for fall and then include some basic information um you can expand that if you're on mobile you can click this here and it'll show you where you are in person if you're doing the walk um and if i have a bit more time i guess one final thing that i really like is you can come to the corner here of your end of your story maps go to your details and if you have a like image in your thumbnail that hasn't um cropped nicely from the store map you can edit it put in any image you like you can add descriptions to make it easier to find and you can add in tags and i would say that is basically the overview of what i have done with storymaps here so now i will pass it over to deanna if i can get my controls up so vienna take away hi i'm deanna i'm with smithsonian's office of advancement communications team as a graphic designer um and we work with all units across smithsonian so all the museums and the zoo creating pieces for fundraising and cultivating donors so something i just learned today we're actually going to be working with kaylie's team the smithsonian gardens doing a piece for fundraising for their orchids collection in the spring so that'll be exciting um so we our team we have three graphic designers and we really started using story maps when the pandemic first started back in march um so during this time we really had to pivot our work and the way that we work and doing um a lot more digital pieces that were print previously so we began exploring different platforms like story maps so that we could engage our audience in a different way than just your traditional pdf or powerpoint presentation so something that i would compare it to a lot is adobe spark but like we've seen i think that story maps has a lot more robust features that are built in there that i found that adobe spark doesn't have so i'm going to share my screen all right so this is one of my favorite story maps that i created that i think utilized some of the features that we've seen um in the best way so for this project um i our team was tasked to create a birthday present for one of smithsonian's important patrons david rubenstein um so because he's a big history buff we wanted to write in the voice of james smithson the founder of smithsonian but not only in the voice of james smithson but as if he wrote it himself and as if it came from that time so this project documents the process that i went through in order to create this piece so something i really like is this immersive full brief full bleed start and you can use a video which starts automatically um so for the first part i used the sidecar um feature and for the first part of my process i researched james smithson's letters to see the way that he wrote in order to find a font that looked similar to his writing style so i really like the transition that the sidecar makes here so after researching his um his style of writing i found a font called austin that looked very similar to it and then here i use the side car feature or the swipe feature which i really like to show side-by-side comparisons so here we have um james smithson's actual handwriting and then here we have the font that i chose to evoke the same kind of feeling and then here i wanted to show kind of an example of how i altered the text in order to look more like his handwriting so in his original handwriting here you see how expressive the t's are and how exaggerated they are so in the actual letter i went into the font and actually pulled those t's so that they're longer and more similar to his actual handwriting um here we have the before and after of his signature so the second part of my research i looked into papers um and we actually spoke with one of our smithsonian librarians to learn more about 19 19th century paper so we learned that they use a lot of linen blend papers so we spoke with our printers to find a paper that looked a lot like this where you can see the grain and the lines in the paper and then for the third part of this process um i learned how to fold the paper in the way that they would so the letters actually folded into the envelope on a 11 by 17 size paper and then here's a video that i created to send to our printer to show them how to print or how to fold the piece okay and then in this final part it's the same video that we saw in the beginning of the presentation that just goes over kind of the finishing touches that i put onto it so painting the edges so that it looks a little bit more worn and authentic yeah and then finally they're just some close-up pictures and then here's another video of the wax seal process yep and then that's the final look and this is how it was presented so i think that we use story maps in a way that maybe isn't necessarily how it was intended to be used we haven't really used the full potential of all the map features but we've really found that our audience and clients have responded to it really well as an alternative to what you would traditionally see for a presentation um so now i'm going to pass it off to kathy hi everybody um i am kathy carroll i came to the smithsonian as an intern at the smithsonian anacostia community museum uh i guess about a year and a half ago through a program in digital public humanities at georgia mason university i am a teacher as well and currently teaching here in dallas texas and so let me first show you um my oh goodness pardon me i had everything pulled up alan i'm gonna let you ross can i turn this over to you and come back i am apologizing for my technical difficulties that is no problem at all um so i can start sharing my screen and what we'll do is we'll just move forward into the advanced tips and tricks demo while kathy gets all set up and then we'll hand it back over to her so i'm going to share my screen now hopefully everybody can see this kathy can you see this yes i can thank you perfect okay awesome so um i'm going to be building on the great demo that liz gave us earlier and go a little deeper into some of the specific techniques to extend the functionality of arcgis story maps now when i think about arcgis story maps i think about it as a picture frame you can put any type of content into this picture frame whether it's photos whether it's rich multimedia content with videos and audio or whether it has maps in it and so what i'm going to show is how to how to go a little bit deeper um so this is just this is a story maps this is a story and i'll be presenting in it and the first thing we're going to dig into is a technique called map choreography and map choreography is a really easy technique to implement within your story project but what it does is it walks your readers through a series of map layers that perhaps would be really overwhelming on you know first load but using storytelling techniques you can walk your readers through that data so how this works is we're going to this is just a sidecar and i'll i'll break this apart in a minute but as the reader scrolls you can see this is a web map of active wildfires i can zoom in and zoom out on it as i scroll i then zoom in on the map automatically so i am changing the map view by changing the extent of the map and as you zoom in you get more detail so you can see this is colorado fires zoom in one more time and you can get even closer in and so in doing map choreography you can create a really immersive reading experience for your audience and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you how to implement this in your own projects the other thing that i'm going to show is a fun technique where you can actually add background audio within a sidecar section so here we've got this you know photo of a firefighter and behind it i've added some audio i'm not sure if you can hear that but what it is is it's the sound of fire a wildfire raging and so by bringing in these um rich audio elements it will allow your readers to connect deeper with the content of your story and will create a more engaging experience okay so i'm going to show you how i did this so here we have a sidecar block and like liz showed earlier it's got a series of slides in it and you can see that it uses the same map but it's just zooming in a little bit further so how i did this was i just added a new slide i clicked add media went to add map and like liz talked about earlier there's three ways to add maps these are from my arcgis online account you've got the ability to create an express map you also have access to the living atlas layers living atlas is esri's cloud database that comes from authoritative sources like like our esri teams like universities and a variety of other organizations now this i'm going to add in this u.s wildfire activity map and this should look familiar this is the one that i had on here before so i'm going to go to the full extent of the united states i'm going to place this map in and so we have we have a map with the map of wildfire activity okay now the trick here is to go into these three dots at the bottom and click duplicate what this does is it simply creates a copy of that slide that you had before now with this next slide what i'm going to do is i'm just going to zoom in a little bit on the map and particularly i'm interested in colorado it's been in the news a lot and it'll bring the readers into a specific use case okay and just to drive this home we'll do that one more time we'll duplicate that slide it creates a new one this time we're going to zoom in even further on this specific event that's currently happening we'll click place map and here's a specific wildfire so what we just did was we used sidecar the sidecar block to create map choreography to bring our readers into a rich data set showing wildfire activity now you can also do this by keeping the same extent of your map so by not zooming in or zooming out but just changing the data layers that are visible so let's duplicate this one more time we'll go in here and you can see there's all of these amazing rich thematic map layers and so we can turn these on and off so for right now let's turn let's just turn on the perimeter click place map and so this time what's changing on the map is just the data layer that's present you do this one more time and let's show those those hot spots and place the map and so by doing this you can create a really immersive experience for your reader without having to do a bunch of custom coding i didn't even have to author a new map i just was able to take living atlas layers and bring it into my story um so that's the first advanced tip that i would share and it's really exciting to see a lot of authors taking advantage of this feature i think it elevates the storytelling content and adds polish and richness to a story the next technique is one that we use sparingly but can be really effective for certain stories this is adding background audio within a side car block so that when there's an image or a video or something else there's audio playing in the background now to enable this you simply click those three dots again and click background audio now i've already added in that that sound of the fire but if i were to do this from scratch all you have to do is go in here click add background audio browse to your audio file add and you get this nice message that it's been added okay so and there's also this indication here this little note symbol um to just preview what this will look like um we can go in to our map choreography section this is the one that we just created together and you see this message here this says unmute background audio when i do that the audio starts playing and when the reader scrolls it'll turn off and so in doing so it's sort of an opt-in experience for readers okay the next thing i want to show you is a really powerful tool called collections now collections is a feature within um story maps that allows you to take a variety of stories on a related theme and package them up all in one place um this is going to be a good primer for kathy's presentation because the collection i wanted to show you is actually one that she made so i don't want to spoil it but i'm going to just show you how she packaged up eight different story maps and had them all in one place as a digital exhibit i'm going to let her talk more about that but essentially you can jump to a different story and in doing so you have this package set of stories all together now i'm going to show you how to make one from scratch okay so what i just did was i clicked on um this link this goes to our collections page another way to get there is to just click on your profile picture here and click collections now this is a little trick because a lot of people don't know that you can click on your your profile picture and you get access to go back to your stories page go to the collections page go to the themes page or to sign out your switch accounts right now let's go to the collections page so you can see it looks very similar to this to our stories page but in collections you can see these are collections that i've put together to create a new collection you just click here new collection you can create a title description click add to collection and this brings up all the stories that you've created now you can also favorite stories you can find stories that were shared with you or go into the living atlas again right now i'll just select first three first six stories we'll pretend that they all are related in the same theme and click done and you can see them you can open a preview you can also move and change the order of them similar to arcgis story maps you're able to have this design panel where you can change the overall look and feel you can also add a logo at any time right now i'm going to choose this tab to lay up and when i click publish you can see what the story is going to look like so i'll click get started and here it comes to my first story my demo you can scroll down go through it you can also advance to another story another story another story so hopefully this gives you an idea for how you can package up all of your stories into one place now if i want to go back to my stories simply click on my profile go back to my demo story and click down here jump to the collection section next i want to talk about google analytics now one of you asked in the chat window how can i record and get information about who's viewing my stories now we've made it really easy to integrate google analytics directly into the builder so that you can track how your story is performing and better understand your audience so to do this you're going to go into the story settings tab you get there by clicking these three dots go to story settings and here you put in your google analytics tracking id now i won't go into google analytics too deep but if you go into your account go to your admin page you can get your tracking information really easily and paste it in here once you paste it in you click save and within 24 hours it'll start recording information on you know how many views your stories receives where they're coming from whether they're using a desktop or mobile device and things like that that can be really helpful for better understanding your audience um the next technique i want to show is story duplication so after i publish my story you'll get a variety of options here to share out your content whether it's with a link or social media but when you're in the builder you can actually duplicate your story at any time so say you have a a newsletter and you want to create a story that has a similar look and feel every week that you put out the newsletter you can make one story that sort of becomes your guide or template and then you just click duplicate story it prompts you to have this question click yes duplicate and it will create a copy within your account so then you have two versions of the same story and you can modify perhaps the text or some of the visuals from your your copy and in doing so it'll save you a lot of time you won't have to redo everything from scratch there's a lot of other workflows you could think about for when this would be helpful but again to get there you just simply go to those three dots and click duplicate story okay there's also a question about embedding a story into um a website or a drupal or a moodle site so when you make a story public there's some really easy tools that we've developed so that you can integrate these however you want so first you know when you publish and make it public your story lives here it lives on esri server and this is the url that you can use now you can copy that directly here you can share it on social media really easily but if you click these three dots you get more actions and this is where you can do a couple really powerful things first you can embed the story so if say you have your smithsonian website and you want to integrate a story directly into that website you can copy this iframe code and your developers could put that email into your website and actually have it on you know smithsonian.com you know whatever story and you can put in this iframe code and you have the option to hide the story header and the story cover if you want and so what that would do is it would hide this here and it would start right here this is the header this is the cover and this is your story body okay so you can embed it directly if you want now a lot of organizations have figured out different workflows and it's up to you to figure out what works best for for your organization you know an organization like noah for instance um they have little images of their story and when you click on an image it'll open that story in a new tab so they've just taken they've copied the link to a story and on their website they've created a nice little image where you could click on it and you can go directly there um so it's up to you to figure out what works best within for your audience and your goals now there's a couple more actions in here that i want to just touch on there's a question about printing there's a simple you know print to pdf option here it gives you a little preview of course you know things like you know map choreography or interactive elements those won't be able to persist within a pdf but if you have the need for this you can um you know export it directly as a pdf just by pressing print i'll go back to my story and just show you this other cool feature where you can click turn on autoplay promise it's working automatically but this is a great thing for presentations for exhibit spaces where you have perhaps a big monitor and you know you want people or patrons who are walking by to be able to look at you know interesting uh content on that monitor and so if you have something like map choreography you know this can be a really engaging way for people to take a look at rich storytelling content automatically on one of those displays again i've published this made it public then i turned on autoplay okay let's see how are we doing on time how are how are you doing kathy i'm doing great okay um shall we try again if you'd like yeah do you want to do you want to take over um sure sharing and yes and we can go back to you all right i think you have to unshare first yeah let me just stop shooting there we go all right my apologies everybody as i said i'm a teacher in dallas and so i had a bunch of students who were um my a team's meeting was popping up and i clicked too many things to shut out so anyway my apologies so i came to um story maps like i said from george mason university doing an internship at the smithsonian anacostia community museum and the task was to develop some educational content for use in the dc public schools and when i dug down into their curriculum map um it was evident that the exhibit that dr samir miguel had created was one that was really important in terms of what dcps students were learning in their senior year in high school and so my goal was to not only create curriculum but to create a digital exhibit so that teachers could use it as a pre-visit experience [Music] they could use it as if they weren't able to get to the museum that during the run of the exhibit that they would be able to use it then um and that really that the exhibit should really have a life beyond just the exhibit run which has been extra important to this exhibit because it was um subject to government shutdowns uh the museum when i know you all smithsonian employees remember that um the museum also underwent some renovation last summer and then clearly um the pandemic has has shortened the length of this run so uh it's not only given uh the anacostia community museum a way to share what they were learning during or share this great exhibit during closures um but it will continue to live on in dcps curriculum um going forward and i think that that's something that's really powerful and the story that dr miguel created is really powerful as well so as ross mentioned i did create this using the collections feature so a right to the city tells the story of um six washington dc neighborhoods and how they responded to um urban renewal and gentrification um mostly after world war ii and um the neighborhoods were um the way the the physical exhibit was laid out uh most of the content in here uh generally speaking is you know from the exhibit guide and i didn't do a lot of rewriting of the the material i did shorten it some places or rearrange things for it to fit the story map but you can again use the collections feature to walk through these laterally this was nice in terms of planning for students to use as the curriculum if you do like a jigsaw method in teaching um it was a way to for students to maybe um access you know each individual neighborhood but what was really exciting was to be able to pull in the sense of place to these great photos and being able to use um some interesting mapping features that that um you can use using the living atlas so this is an old national geographic map um that i was able to layer over present day and then also able to go in and geo-locate a lot of these photos that you'll see as you as you move through the exhibit so the ability to use maps um really helped to tell the story in a way that it wouldn't have been um possible to do otherwise another feature that i like is the ability to pull out quotes so we had these quotations that dr mcgilly had found and so really creating a lot of the experience that you would see in the physical space and then the ability to translate that into a digital environment if you scroll a little bit further down um they had ross talking about things that were on the monitor so the museum had these great um oral history snippets and um so these were community voices um that were on the smithsonian youtube channel um that we were able to then uh just embed using that feature that um ross was talking about one of the things that i really love about story maps is its stability and um there's been so much that has gone into the design of being able to engineer um a really powerful platform platform that works on um multiple devices so this was us just um you know taking the exhibit and repurposing it and and putting it into a different container that um shares this great story of washington dc neighborhoods when i mentioned that i'm a teacher and when we went to virtual learning in the spring i turned to story maps as a way to curate content or curate lessons for my students we were in the middle of doing producing an oral history documentary film and instead of abandoning that project students were able to to continue that learning i am continuing to use story maps on a daily basis and for having students who are physically present with me and also students who are learning from home at the same time it is a nice way to keep all of my lesson content in one spot um so this is my story map uh embedded in a story map and one of the things that again you can embed so many different things this is actually i borrowed this idea from the dallas museum of art it's a jigsaw planet so i use this as a warm-up activity so if you're thinking um smithsonian you know creators if you have objects that you can turn into puzzles um that a student could use to you know promote those skills of close reading it's something that they that they work on daily in my class this is the lesson map that students are using today we're going through and looking at some coins from the time of julius caesar and it just gives me a way to curate the lesson that they need um on a daily basis so that they can work through things um on their own you're able to embed things like data visualizations um and then um you know using buttons to in to put pdfs of you know images of timelines and so this is not a super traditional way of using story maps but it has been one that has been really helpful for me as a teacher i do also use the story maps in terms of like the founding myths this is one where i did use that map tour feature um to trace the journey of aeneas throughout the mediterranean um so that the students as they're reading this that they really get a sense of place one of the things that ross mentioned in terms of that duplication feature that i really like is that as i've kind of found my flow in writing these and knowing how my students giving them something to anticipate a daily rhythm to how the lesson is going to go whether they're at home or in person or if we have to end up going all virtual at some point this year that there is that familiarity and so being able to use these tabs where they can click through to different parts of the lesson are important and it saves me time because i can i can duplicate that i love using story maps this summer this is not one that's finished but we went to colorado and looked at the original alpine tunnel that was created in um colorado in the 1800s and so kind of juxtaposing um how the alpine tunnel of the 1890s differed from the alpine tunnel or the eisenhower tunnel that we see today and just seeing that change over time in the last hundred years so those are different ways um i've used story maps from curating a museum exhibit digitally to just taking ordinary objects from museum collections that are licensed by creative commons to create interesting works for my students so thank you very much um ross should i turn this over to alan and dan i think great we're actually going to uh turn it over to liz who's going to do a live q a um now before she gets started i'm going to open a poll uh for participants to fill out um so i'm going to launch that poll and it's just uh how are you thinking about using story maps um in your work whether it's presentations virtual museum so we'll let that run for a couple minutes um and while that's going i'll turn things over to liz to do a live q a now just a reminder feel free to add any questions that you have to the q a uh window we've got our panelists here ready to answer questions whether it's about the product or whether it's about their amazing work so over to you over to you awesome thank you so much ross and thank you everybody for your incredible engagement and questions uh i'll be pulling directly from the q a so like ross mentioned if folks have any questions they want to ask the panelists or a member of the store maps team feel free to drop them in there right now but for the moment i'm going to start off with a question for our panelists from the smithsonian would store maps be worth using for something like a walking tour of an individual museum well i can i can tackle that uh they certainly can we have not done too many indoor story maps that present some uh mapping challenges uh but we're we're actually planning to uh to take that on as a kind of r d effort with uh with with one of the smithsonian museums it's it's very preliminary so i don't want to get into details and share information that we either don't have yet or is a little confidential but there's lots of potential there and we're excited about exploring that thanks alan i'll also just say that you know if you have a really good story and you have the points and you want to jump people around to different parts of a exhibit or different parts of your museum i say go for it our stories are super flexible and very creative so the sky's really the limit if you have a thought and an idea there's no harm in experimenting and trying to figure it out and we're also more than happy to kind of answer any questions or or help you try and figure it out from our end as well the next question i have is directly for some of the smithsonian folks uh how much usage or traffic have you seen from these different stories and specifically this cherry blossom story for instance um so a really nice feature is i can see the number of views if i go into my story details for the cherry blossoms map there's been just shy of 6000 views um for the fall one since i released that more recently that um i think it's around 400 and the summer one has had somewhere between 1 000 and 2 000. great thank you so much does anybody else want to talk about different view levels they see their stories getting i think it also really depends on how much you socialize it and what platforms you put it out on generally speaking a lot of stories i know get made and used internally so they might see less traffic but they're generally just as valuable the numbers can vary enormously depending on the topic and the timing and how you publicize a story our own team published stories range from uh uh quite small maybe dozens to low hundreds to uh to hundreds of thousands we published early early in the covid crisis the story on the on the coronavirus and that uh that that of course broke all records and got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views yeah it's probably most difficult for us after making a story map to just get it out there um because it relies on traffic to our website traffic to our social media um so it's always the struggle of figuring out how to get it in front of the eyes that we want to see it yeah those are all all great points so the next question we have is for these existing smithsonian stories are you finding that it's the general public using them or school groups or both i know that ours has been shared in dc public schools um it's also given it a little bit of a life outside of the washington dc area many students from texas go to washington dc over spring break and so um i know of a couple of tour groups that actually went to go visit the anacostia museum right before it shut down and so i think it's um pulling people into a part of washington dc and some of the lesser known museums that they wouldn't have necessarily gone to or known about otherwise and of course we we know that there's a there's a move on within smithsonian to uh to provide opportunities to virtually visit obviously in the time of the covid crisis this is a huge huge opportunity but is it's it's it's a opportunity anytime because of course not not only a minority of the american or international populations can get to washington dc so story maps specifically but all sorts of other web resources in general are great way to to vastly expand the audience that smithsonian reaches and just and i know that you know in in the time of covet teaching teachers are really looking for robust resources um and content so that's another thing to think about cathy have you challenged your students to make their own story maps i have um unfortunately i teach at a one-to-one ipad school i shouldn't say unfortunately but it's a lot harder to build on an ipad i think we're about to perhaps make some changes or begin to think about that in that regard and i can't wait because i will be the first to have them build story maps but i will say one thing that i think is um great in terms of the flexibility on for education is that that ability to be on a tablet or on um a phone you know been seeing all the different devices especially in bring your own technology bring your own device teaching environments um the ability to have them perform in a stable fashion across all platforms is really a real strength yeah that's that's a great point kathy uh the next question we have is kind of a fun one to think about um so if we've created custom maps for our physical exhibits can they be added to the kind of thing that ross is demoing and so i'm not really 100 sure what part of ross's demo this was from but ross i'd like to toss this out to you what do you think thanks um so how i interpreted this question was perhaps this was during the map choreography section of my presentation and um so yes certainly incorporating custom maps that are in exhibits is possible um in a variety of ways so if for instance you've made a custom map that has data that's um you know that you have access to and can share on google uh on arcgis online then then you can do that map choreography uh directly into a story now if you just have static images you can also incorporate those directly in but you'll lose a little bit of that sort of animation of zooming into a specific area you can replicate some of those features by perhaps taking a uh you know an image that's at the country scale and then cropping into a specific area and as the reader scrolls you'll go from this kind of global scale down to a more focused scale it's a little bit of a different experience but you can still bring in those custom elements so that's a quick answer to your to your excellent question i also you know want to take a second to share the polling results um for those of you who filled that out um 61 said educational materials was how you know they'd like to use this second was presentations a virtual museum exhibit is up there social media content a virtual newsletter internal communications so um it's really exciting to think creatively about how these tools perhaps can make things a little bit easier for the workflows that you're doing in your day-to-day work and again we're always available feel free to reach out if you have questions speaking of questions i'll turn it back over to you liz to pull to bring those back in awesome thank you so much ross and it's always great to see the responses to the polls one of my favorite parts of this job is seeing how you all the user community make use of our product but also just seeing your stories so i i look forward to seeing all the great stories that are gonna happen after this webinar the things you've been working on please don't hesitate to reach out the next question is one specifically for kathy kathy with dc public schools having restrictions on certain websites did you have to work with them to do anything special for them to view it um i did work with the social studies curriculum coordinator for dcps um just to get his um you know take on what would be most helpful but he was willing to once we created that and to embed it in their curriculum um curriculum map as a go-to resource so it wasn't anything that was blocked um but it was actually something that was promoted by by dcps and so i you know encourage you to reach out and get into those curriculum maps and kind of find the places where your content might dovetail with what they're teaching on a particular grade level in a particular subject yeah that's a really great point and a great great question especially when you're working with educational institutions and also knowing that there are different standards that some things have to me it's always helpful to make sure you're communicating directly with educators let's see i guess this is another we've got a lot of a great education-centric questions uh has there been any feedback from teachers who have used it um do they link it or are they requesting anything in particular and i i think this might be again about kathy's story um or even about some of the other smithsonian kind of tour stories as well so i'll just open that up to to everyone um i would love to hear more feedback um we're very happy at any time for people to email us at smithsonian gardens um our site or our email address and tell us how they've been using it um but we haven't heard too much yet yeah that's a a great point more feedback's always welcome right let's see what's what's next um diana wants to know is there a link or a limit to how many links you can include on a map how many layers can a map include for example a photo that links to somebody's website that also includes a youtube link or social media links i'll take a a quick stab at this and then invite some of my story maps people in smithsonian featured panelists to jump in on this but diana know there is not a limit to how many links you can include on a map but that doesn't mean you should use as many links as possible you can add links by hyperlinking them to your text you can add them in buttons and different calls to action um but a really interesting way to add in different links in a map specifically is making a layer that has some really rich information and then using what we call arcade scripts and i'll drop some links in the chat on specifically what i'm talking about to configure your pop-ups so you could have somebody click on a point and then link out to maybe four or five different things without overwhelming your reader with a bunch of different buttons or hyperlinks and text um and alan i see you're unmuted so yeah it's it's uh it's it's something we wrestle with uh having links and stories can be useful to people because obviously you're providing uh you know access to additional information but a link can also be uh uh essentially an invitation to leave your story and i'm i i think you want to be a little a little careful with not inviting people to to to leave to too often and it can it can be distracting after a while too so so we like links but we we like uh we like to choose our our links with with care and limit the number yeah that's a great point about inviting folks to leave your story i think one of the general best practices that i follow when i add links is you know if it's to additional information i can generally hyperlink it in the text but if i want to make sure that my audience sees it's an additional resource that i really want them to go to i add it at the end it's always nice to have a robust call to action section or additional information and you can make use of strategic placement to keep people in your story for longer and by the way don't don't be don't be afraid that people are going to that nobody's going to get to the end of your story we haven't done as much research on this lately as i'd like but we have done some research on on how sticky stories are and story maps are incredibly uh sticky so a a little study we did a couple of years ago maybe three years ago now compared i guess the average time people spend on a typical web page is about 30 seconds but for our team produced stories the average time was something like 6 minutes and 45 seconds which is an eternity in in internet time so stories are engaging stories really get people excited they literally change people's minds because people our brains secrete this chemical called oxytocin which increases our empathy this is in response to character driven stories so so stories that that that uh you know might put a donate button at the end because that button is at the end doesn't mean people won't get there and people won't click on that button another great point i never thought that i'd really want something i made to be super sticky but it's great that story maps are let's see how is seo for specific story maps do they often show up in search results they do early on in our tenure they we we didn't pay much attention to seo uh fortunately now our developers and uh colleagues in arcgis online and elsewhere have paid a good bit of attention and now i find almost always the fastest way when i'm looking for a specific story i'll i'll type a description or that what i remember the title of the story and add story maps at the end and almost always it comes up very at the top or very close to the top of just a typical google search so uh so yeah seo is working work seems to be working quite well for our gis story maps great thanks alan uh so at this point i'd love to call your attention to the chat uh ross just uh sent a message in it and that's the chat not the general q a there is a survey and it will give us more information on how we can keep improving arcgis story maps so please go ahead and click that link and make sure you fill it out soon after this webinar we will make sure that this webinar is available by the end of the week on our youtube channel and i saw that in the chat there's also a request for the questions and answers and the links that were shared we'll also collect the chat and the links and put together like a brief frequently asked questions story for you all to access and include the links to my demo and ross's demo story uh if he wants to as well um and so with that i think we have maybe time for a couple of more questions and then i'll hand it over to dan and alan to close us out so we have a question here if you could only afford a license for one year when your license expires will the collection be gone or will they continue to exist and you just wouldn't be able to update or change them so that is a a great question um alan and correct me if i'm wrong here but i don't believe that your stories or collections will go away once you don't have a license anymore we also have a free version of stories so if your account is just bumped back down to that free version they'll continue to exist right alan i confess i'm a little vague on the details there i know your story lasts for some period of time after your account expires but i'm not sure ross do you do you know if if not we can we can get back to you later on that i'm back um so it depends is the is the answer which um is a little bit vague but so if you are part of an organization say you are part of smithsonian and you work there and then you leave smithsonian you know what happens to your stories that you authored in your account now in that scenario what happens is um you know dan cole who administers the the accounts he will take your items that you've created and he will transfer ownership so that your amazing work creating stories creating collections won't just disappear right and so if you aren't within an organization and have a year-long license um you know i would there's there's some things you can do so one is you know you can always transfer your content to another organization if you you know have a personal one and then go to work for an organization or you are part of a non-profit i would consider you know create a public account because it doesn't cost anything and you can create stories in that today lots of functionality there so if you are an individual user there's kind of different things that you different options you have or if you're in an organization you have different options you can have so that's why i preface this way that depends yeah this is a good chance also to mention esri's non-profit program for for those of you who who might be from organizations outside the smithsonian that are not profits esri has a very robust program that offers deep deep discounts to nonprofit organizations and you can get details at esri.com nonprofit there's a simple form that allows you to sign up and it essentially just covers some hosting costs and and the rest is is essentially free so hundreds of non-profit organizations are using taking advantage of that program and you also have a great program for schools too yes yeah and any school in the country in fact worldwide these days any k-12 school in the country that wants to uh that requests an account can can can get an arcgis online account including story maps free of charge that's a incredible thing to call out kathy and alan it's one of my favorite things about esri and arcgis story maps is the fact that a lot of times story maps is available at a really discounted cost or low to no cost with that i think we've wrapped up just about the time we have for the q a section so i'm going to hand it back over to alan and dan to close us out thank you everyone great well thank you so much for joining us today it's a real thrill it's just been it's been so exciting to see uh smithsonian and other uh like institutions kind of jump on board or at least express lots of interest in jumping on board we're here to help and assist uh and uh please do let us know if you have questions uh concerns comments etc dan and anybody who from the smithsonian that is anybody who wants an arcgis online account which is pretty much needed for creating a story map contact me and i'll create an account for you great it's been a real pleasure working with dan uh he's he's been uh he's been a real champion for us and uh and we're grateful to that and again thank you so much for joining us everybody you

Channel: ArcGIS

Views: 2,189

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Geographic Information System, ArcGIS Pro, storytelling, ArcGIS StoryMaps, Smithsonian, workshop, webinar

Id: nFZEjja7lGQ

Length: 115min 8sec (6908 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020