Story Map Tips and Tricks

hello and welcome we're excited to have all of you with us today to learn some tips and tricks on how you can tell great stories through story map we have some great speakers lined up today too and we hope to provide you some context around story maps and some we'll be providing some demos as you can see here is our agenda we will begin with Alan Carroll he's our first presenter he'll shed some light on what story maps are he'll share some examples of story maps and why we tell stories following Alan is Grace and Harris he'll be providing a demo on how to build a story map show us where we can find some resources for continued inspiration and after that we will get a sneak peek at the next generation of story maps we'll wrap up today with some questions from all of you and finally we'll be sharing some details regarding this year's tribal story map challenge if you have any questions for our speakers during this session please use the GoToWebinar console we'll be responding to your questions after the presentation concludes if you are unable to answer if we are unable to answer any of your questions during the session well be replying to you by email and now without any further delay we will go ahead and welcome Alan Carroll so thank you Alan sure thank you it's a great pleasure to be here doing there we go I hope you're I hope you're all seeing a big story maps in the middle your screen that's been my life the last eight years or so I founded the story Maps team here at ESRI and I came to ESRI after 27 years at national geographic of course National Geographic is known for beautiful images and beautiful maps and so I've been interested in telling stories with maps for a long time but even more interested in kind of combining using the power of the internet and the and the and the digital age to combine beautiful images and other multimedia content to tell stories and so that's that's what we've been working on and I'm just going to go ahead and show you what the basics of story maps are and of course I'm going to show you the basics of story maps in the of a storymap I've pretty much given up on PowerPoint cuz story maps do everything that PowerPoint does as far as I'm concerned and a whole lot more so let me dive in here so story maps are web applications that combine interactive maps so that's those are maps that you might have created an ArcGIS desktop or directly in des rues cloud service ArcGIS online you can also tap the huge at tap into the huge ecosystem of maps that shared maps on our GIS online including Ezra's living atlas of the world which presents a curated set a really beautiful authoritative content in the form of maps imagery etc so you can combine those with your multimedia content so that means your photos your videos occasionally audio as well with with text of course to tell all sorts of stories about the world and stories literally cover the earth and go from world wide to regional right down to to neighborhoods and everything in between stray Maps work on a variety of screen sizes so in other words they're responsive so the story you produce will work just fine on a mobile device as well as a tablet or app or a PC and this is most important to me because I am NOT a technical person so they incorporate interactive builders so which you'll see so this means that you don't need any web development skills you don't need to know things like JavaScript and CSS and stuff like that's it so kind of a mystery to me in order to create a quite sophisticated multimedia presentation story maps are hosted by ESRI in the cloud so you don't have to worry about hosting but they're open source which means that if you do want to hosam yourselves you can find the source code you can download it you can if you're a developer you can modify it or you can work with developers to customize that source code as much as you want to to host and create your own highly customized story map if you'd like we have over the years developed a handful of user experience is that that provide or enable various ways of telling mat based stories and I'm gonna run through those quickly and sort of conceptually and then I'm going to show you examples of actually tribe tribal stories in most of these categories so hang in there and you'll see some some live examples my team's favorite and my favorite is story map cascade and the idea of Cascade is the whole screen Scrolls I'll show you that shortly it's very versatile can combine lots of beautiful content in in lots of different ways our most popular app is story map journal and instead of the whole screen scrolling what we call the side panel Scrolls and as you move from section to section within the story the the rest of this the screen or the main stage updates to show actually whatever you want to show anything with a URL so that can be a web map that might as you go from section to section you might move around within a met web map you might show different layers within a map but that main stage can also show photos videos other story maps pretty much any again pretty much anything and you can incorporate multimedia content even in the in the side panel as well I should mention by the way going back to cascade that you're seeing this presentation in the form of a cascade story next is story map series so it like journal has a side panel although you can opt to not have that side panel but instead of a continuous scrolling experience you can break the story up into sections that are shown via tabs or like I'm using up here a series of bullets you can also there's also a layout called side accordion where the side panel has a list of numbers and if you click on one of them it expands to show show that part of the the narrative short list is a little bit different so unlike the others which are more or less continual narratives this is a this utilizes a curated set of points of interests in and around destination so that so there's a main there's a map and there's a there's a gallery of thumbnails you can also organize the points of interest into these tabs one cool thing about shortlist is that as you pan and zoom around the map the items in the thumbnail panel update according to what's in the current map view so if you're exploring a neighborhood then it's you're only seeing the the points of interest within that within that area not you're not distracted by by the rest of the points of interest and the story map tour was our original our first app and in some ways it's the simplest it's a series of geotagged photos and videos it supports short form text and there are two or three different layout options for for tour as well it's been a really exciting seven years or so we've seen our numbers grow exponentially we're now well over seven hundred fifty thousand story maps hosted on ArcGIS online with many thousands more those excuse me hosted within organizations we can't see those to count but my guess is they're about a million story maps out there and it's growing rapidly and to us a very exciting subset of those are the stories that that groups like you are producing and I'm going to show you just a selection of tribal story maps that also illustrate some of these apps so actually I'm going to click over here this actually was a prize winner in one of our storytelling with maps competition either I'm forgetting whether it was nineteen or twenty eighteen or twenty seventeen but beautifully done by the Samish tribe showing the potential effects of climate change on their territory in the San Juan Islands so they very skillfully used a series of maps to show their territory they'd give a nice overview of their culture now as I'm showing you this story I want to describe how cascade works so what we're looking at right now is called a narrative section so everything scrolls by as you as you move down the story but then there are these things called immersive section so you notice as they scrolled this background image kind of snapped into place and instead of the screen scrolling by now there are these floating captions and they can be positioned left center or right and you can control the transition effects but in this case this is an immersive section with just one background image but with each one of these floating captions you can change that background image to say be a map or or or a video and you can create these nice kind of transitions and it just provides a nice way to kind of kind of punctuate the story provide a sense of rhythm and make it even more immersive so here's another immersive section and they've used a different transition effect this is a swipe tool to be able to expose different maps or different layers of maps or in this case a imagery showing the potential inundation caused by by rising sea levels so a really beautiful story that nicely illustrates the power of our cascade app I'm going to show you one other cascade app that shows you also the the diversity of topics that you can take on so that was that was something that covers a large piece of territory kind of conceptual kind of predicting the future and advising about about resilience and adaptation to climate change this one is a more kind of nuts-and-bolts guide to trails in indian canyons and so they've got beautiful images the trails along with descriptions of each trail so nice nice vivid sense of the landscape and a practical kind of guide to to the trails in this in the area in this case they've chosen to just use a series of immersive sections probably because they don't have long-form text - - as part of the story so again it's an example of the kind of versatility of these apps that's yet another cascade story using in this case some web maps and again a rich mix of multimedia content including imagery that they've added additional information on top of here's an example of storymap journal and storymap journal is actually the most popular of our apps with with literally hundreds of thousands of examples out there so as I mentioned before in the case of journal this there's a scrolling side panel and as you can see as I go from section to section in the story the the main stage changes to show a series of graphics and images maps etc another cool thing about journal is that you can have within even within a single section you can have you can have what we're called story excuse me story actions so even within a single section with bullets or with essentially like text hyperlinks you can send people to different places you can you can bring them to images you can you can send them straight to a map etc here's another example of side panel again using a nice variety of infographics and maps and images and as you as I mentioned before you can have you can have multimedia content within the side panel as well and then you can use this little navigation device to just zip from from one spot to another within the story this is a this is an example of story map series so this is the tabbed layout a series so here you can see very much like journal there's a side panel here but it's just one section to go to the next part of the story I click on another tab and it too has its own side panel so this could be nice if you're presenting a series of maps or you want to give your readers an option of kind of jumping around from theme to theme as if you think they're going to be interested in specific parts of the story and then this is an example of storymap tour and it's useful especially for things like this so in this case it's a small area and they're locating with archival photos a series of of landmarks we see storing mapped or used a lot for things like virtual tours of historic districts or trail guides things like that in fact that the the story map cascade I showed you that was a trail guide was kind of unusual because we've seen most trail guides we see in the form of a story map tour or journal another nice thing about tour and in fact about most of our apps is that there's a way to kind of move by default sequentially through the story but it also kind of liberate cyou tzer's to to navigate on their own so if I want to I can just kind of hijack the narrative and I can move from place to place on the map or in this case as you can see there's also a carousel along the bottom that I can I can use to kind of pick and choose what what locations I want to I want to look at one last thought and I'm going to turn it over to Grayson is that more and more organizations including tribes are creating whole series of story maps which they often aggregate are present within a within a gallery so in in this case the Seneca Nation of Indians has created an attractive place where they can where they can aggregate all their story maps and summarize them people can explore and discover story maps that that they find interesting and here's another here's another map tour so that's that's our array of apps in a quick nutshell I'll be back later in our little demo - to preview the next generation that we're really excited about so take it away hello everybody just to reiterate Allen it is quite a pleasure to be presenting to you all today I work with Allen out of Arlington Virginia on the story Maps team so we spend a lot of our time either building story maps or supporting a variety of organizations such as yourselves in their own story mapping efforts and so I just wanted to say that I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the stories that you produce as part of the tribal story maps challenge so what you're seeing in front of you on your screens is the story Maps website so this is located that story maps that ArcGIS com so this is a part of ArcGIS online it's connected with ArcGIS online but it's sort of the direct line to story map specifically and this is where I would recommend you go for finding resources about story maps as well as building and managing your story Maps it just says a note for those of you who are familiar with the ArcGIS online Avenue specifically content and my content everything you do on the story Maps website also shows up here in your content so it's it's all it's all the same material it's all in the same place but you can access it both through ArcGIS online and this story Maps website and today I'll be showing you the story Maps Avenue so when you come to our website you're of course going to see our our home page and some of our featured stories so these are recent stories that either our team or the broader user community has created and this is a really good place to see sort of what's what's new in story maps as well as get some ideas of what you can do with story maps there's also a lot of other great resources here that all return to towards at the end of this what I want to point out now is this apps tab under apps you're going to find entries for all of the different user experiences or layouts that Allen was describing earlier and showing you examples of this is a great place to come to learn more about these specific layouts and how they work in terms of an overview you can access a sorted gallery of examples of that layout as well as find a tutorial walking me through how to use this particular app so this is a very useful page in sort of the heart of the story Maps car sorry maps that are chess comm website you can also jump right in and get started building story maps here and that's what I'm going to demonstrate today so as you can see I'm already logged in to my ArcGIS online account that's an important first step and if you know what which app you want to use you can go straight to it which is what I'm gonna do today I'm going to be building a story map cascade when I click that build button it's going to launch a new tab and open up the Builder so this is that interactive builder Allan was describing where you can actually assemble your material sort of drag and drop style without having to code or develop anything on your own a brief overview of what you're seeing here again this is the Cascade app in this main area is essentially the viewer so this is more or less what a reader will see when they come to your publish story in addition there's a sidebar here which is sort of like your outline view as you start adding content to the story it'll appear here as units that you can then reorganize delete and otherwise manage and at the top here are a variety of global options that I'll go through at the end of the demonstration particularly of importance are the sharing settings to go from something that's private and to something that's published in public so to start working with this you can click into an area and immediately start typing so I I stole a blog post from the Smithsonian that had a visitation of some folks working with a traditional style of canoe in Hawaii and I just copied and pasted that into my title space here on the cover and that goes right in there and as always it's best practice to save frequently and often and once I have that in place I can start building out this story so you'll notice there's a default cover image back here and I of course can change that if I click on this media picker I'm going to get this media window that opens up and you're gonna see this throughout cascade so this is a standard tool that you can use to bring in all types of media from dragging and drop images from your desktop into this area to choosing items from ArcGIS online in this case I'm gonna pull in a photograph from a public domain image service called unsplash unsplash is a separate company it's not associated with ESRI but we have it connected here so you can quickly find all sorts of material to populate a story map when I selected it selected it's added to the cover and that's essentially the workflow or use for adding all other types of media as I get into the body of the story map which is right in this white area of course there's nothing in here yet but I can start copying and pasting in text or typing this directly I have it I have it on in a Word document for the demonstration purposes so this is the author of this original blog that I'm borrowing here now notice when I have text in the body I get this little paragraph icon that pops up now if I select that I see some fairly standard text formatting options such as alignment as well as some header settings heading 1 heading 2 as well as a pull quote so I can break up my text to help out with readability and also to give some custom styling to the way that my story looks to add additional sections you'll see that this little plus sign appears and when I click on that it's going to give me options for the general components of what goes into the story map cascade Allen mentioned that there's a distinction between a narrative section and an immersive section I'll give two the immersive section in a second but for right now all you need to know really is that in a narrative section you're going to essentially be adding in text and media for the most part so I'm going to continue to add a little bit of text here copy that in this time I'm going to choose an h2 so you can see what that looks like now the other thing that I can do with text if I highlight it I get this toolbar that pops pops up for those more specific paragraph paragraph level styling so bold italic underline strikethrough I can link out with hyperlinks as well as change the color of the text so maybe we'll choose some blue here to set it off as a heading continue to add some more text this time will this add a section of standard paragraph text which is what by default comes in there so far I've shown you all of the the text options you have more or less just as I added the cover image I can also add media to the body or inline to the story I'm still under unsplash when I launch let me just go over that one more time so when I hover over the plus I open that up and instead of adding more text I add media and once again I go into the media picker and for this example I'm gonna drag and drop a photo that I have on my desktop in a folder the folder you will not see but if I drag an image into this area it will directly upload it and add it to the story for media in inline to the story I have this little edit pencil down here in the corner so with that if I click it and open it up I can adjust settings such as the size of the image as well as manage the image such as go back to the media picker and choose something else I can remove it and for those of you who are concerned with accessibility there's also an area in here to add alternative text so this would be the information that is read in the case of of folks who are using say screen readers to to read a web page I'm gonna leave that with its defaults for right now and maybe add a little bit more text here just to break up sort of the overall shape of this Allinol is also mentioning that we can add an entire variety of media so this also includes videos videos the main caveat with these is that they need to be already hosted on the internet somewhere so specifically this means needs to be on YouTube or Vimeo they do such a great job of serving up videos already it's a fantastic place to go just to have your videos available so I can even show you how I might do that if I was going to find a video fresh off the internet so if I go here search for something that I'm looking for I already know of a video that's available that talks about this particular type of canoe and when I open this up I have all of the options that I would normally get with sharing a YouTube video so in particular say I find a video on YouTube and this also is true for Vimeo and I want to start it at a particular section or time I can select that time go to share ensure that start at time is checked and then copy this URL return to my story map now when I add a piece of media I'm in the media picker now I'm gonna go to this tab for link to content and I'm going to paste in that URL I took from YouTube and I check that and add it now the video is inline and once I quick click play it will start at that that time that I had set at 27 or 29 seconds so so far I've shown you a lot of different media types in terms of images and videos but I haven't shown you any maps let's go ahead and do that now so something I haven't done for this story we're talking about Hawaii in the larger Oceania area we haven't really located this this story so I might go back up here and provide a locator map or a map to locate what's happening again I go through the media picker this time I'm going to go to ArcGIS and I'm going to create a new map a button here just to do that so for those of you who are familiar with working on ArcGIS online and with web Maps what this does is essentially opened the web map viewer but it's open within the context of a story map so I'm not actually leaving my story so this is just a default web map but I have a few basic options right out that I can change if I click on base map I can change what the overall look of the map looks like I'm gonna choose something kind of simple for now say this this light gray map and if I don't necessarily have a lot of data to show on this map I can add some some simple annotation such as points and names that I choose so in order to do that if I click Add there is an option here for add map notes and this is essentially annotation that is just saved with this map when I go to save it I'm gonna create that you can give it a name if you like and it will appear let me just go back a second it will appear under this content tab like any other layer you might have in a web map but I also want to add some some information to this this is this map notes so this can be simple things like a pushpin let's locate Hawaii here since this is the focal point of the story and I can add information to that point if I had an image somewhere on the internet that I wanted to have show up so associated with that point I could do that here you'd add descriptive text and of course I can change what the symbol itself looks like so let's let's choose something a little bit brighter and more visible when I close it out it is now added to my map perhaps I want to also identify this location beyond just the point I want you want to name it I can choose the option for text put that near my nearby my point and go ahead and name it now before I add this inline to my story map I'm going to save it as with saving any web map it's going to ask me for information including a title it's going to demand tags as well and save it and once it's saved I can close out and it will appear in my story map so you see there's a couple things going on here that I'd like to to adjust just as with an image I have this edit pencil I can go in here I can change the size for example I can also pan and zoom the map so to make sure that I'm showing the part of the world that I want people to see once I have that set up as I like I check that box and now that's how it will appear when people are reading this as always save frequently this is an example of web map added in line to the story map now another powerful feature of Cascade is that section that Alan was talking about called immersive so far the background is essentially locked in place and it Scrolls by as that probably jittery image for you looked like but to add an immersive section I add it just like I would any other section except I'm going to choose immersive as opposed to text or media now when I add immersive this is going to expand down and so what just happened there was I'm scrolling through a standard narrative section and then I enter into the immersive the background locks in place and I see those caption boxes along the side right now this is just the default background but we can add media into here just as we add would add inline to a story map now I showed you last time to creating a new map but I can actually pull upon material any material that is shared publicly on ArcGIS online so under the ArcGIS tab I can filter arc GI online and then I can either find whatever is here or actually search material by name so just for fun let's look at sea temperature sea surface temperature let's just use this map for now I click on that and this is a map that somebody else has created has shared publicly and I have now included into my map now this is this is pretty great alone you can pull upon a whole variety of organizations that are doing publicly available work and drop it directly into your story map on top of that I have now all of the power of Cascade and immersive sections to show what that what information is displayed in that map so for example say I wanted to layer up multiple pieces of data in this map I'm just going to do a simple demonstration for now but say I wanted to start just by showing the area and then I later wanted to add in the sea surface temperature I'm gonna start by duplicating this map so now I have two slides that are exactly the same pretty easy now on this first map I'm going to go in and edit it and as you'll see whenever I edit a map I also have the option to toggle on and off the layers within that map so for this first one I'm gonna turn off sea temperature and just show the standard base map now in that second map as you'll see sea surface temperature is still turned on now what's going to happen when I scroll between these I'm gonna get the transition of displaying both the base map and then the sea surface temperature independently moreover if I hover on this this slide the second slide is where this will appear I have the choice of various transitions when it comes to map maps I have one transition type which is a vertical swipe where I can show a comparison of an area before and after a piece of information comes in like you saw in the example of the this famous tribe but I can do all sorts of things I can add say another image here let's just pull something else from our unsplash this is an example so now as I'm scrolling through I get an area base map I get some information about sea sea surface temperature and then I have a fade transition that goes into an image if I was more selective I would have tried to find an image likely of this area but you can adjust all those different types of transitions right in there so that using using immersive sections can be quite powerful especially doing as I said layering up data that may be otherwise very complex doing before-and-after comparisons comparing say an area in a base map with an area of imagery or change over time there's lots of ways that you can put that to use so I'm going to go ahead and wrap up this example now that I'm in an immersive section actually you know what I'm sorry I skipped something very important here as you notice there's also these caption boxes that come floating by so you can direct enter your text right here you can adjust where this appears on the screen how big it is whether it's small or large or medium you can also change the theme whether it's light on dark or dark on light whether it's a transparent background or an opaque background peggy's better here a number of other options and of course you have the similar text formatting options that you had earlier in terms of styling the color hyperlinking as well as paragraph settings all right so now that that's out of the way I'll go ahead and conclude this coming out of a narrative section sorry coming out of an immersive section this will returned to sort of your standard scrolling web page you'll choose a narrative section which will then appear with the white space again and we always find that when you're building a story you want to have a sort of a call to action at the end something that readers can do once they've come all the way through this this narrative you've presented to them and actually take another step and this could be something similar something very simple such as going and visiting your web page to learn more it also can be something more proactive such as get involved sign up to volunteer sign up for this newsletter and a really simple way to do that is to use all the functions I've already I've already shown you let's add a little bit of text but let's make it prominent let's make it an h1 and Center and let's add a hyperlink so I'm just gonna send people to the story Maps website once that's added it's now an active button that people can click and also a really great practice is we do give you the option to add a credit section so when I activate that I can add in concluding information here such as data sources for data sources for any of the content image attributions just other extra information about the making of this story map I might want people to know but may not need to be front and center within the body of the story map itself as always I'm saving frequently but now I do also want to draw your attention back over here to the the Builder organization function so say I finished my story or is working on my story I didn't like the order of how things ended up I can click organize and rearrange any of these sections and click it when I'm done up here at the top I also have a number of global settings that I have access to under this cog icon here I can change out the information to brand it to my organization including where the logo itself where the logo links a tagline that goes along in the in the top corner of the story if if that tagline needs a link somewhere in particular another nice organization feature of cascade is being able to bookmark certain certain sections so I can basically add chapters to my story map and when I apply that they will now appear here in the header and I can quickly navigate to that section the last important element of your global settings are the appearance so I can do some sweeping changes such as switch from a light to a dark theme which will affect mainly the the narrative sections you'll see a black background with lighter colored text and I also have some limited options for fonts I can choose a font for title and headings and I can also choose a separate font for the body let's change one of those so you can see what that looks like now our cover is a serif font once my storymap is ready to go I've saved it I've perhaps had my co-workers review it and we've done some revisions I'm ready to share it with the world to do that I'm gonna go over here and change this sharing setting from private or perhaps it was on organization if I'm working with other co-workers in my story Maps organization but I'm gonna go over here to public once I click that the story map itself as well as any web maps and data layers included in the story map will then become public and viewable by the public in order to get the word out about this these sharing options in the top top right corner now become available if I click that little share icon I can grab a short link and this can be used to share on social media to send in an email very quickly but I can also select this iframe the iframe is a piece of HTML that you can use to embed this story map on another web page so this is very useful if you do have the website for your organization you you want to use story maps and you can put it and then embed it directly into your web page and make it look more or less seamlessly like a part of of your website so I'm gonna skip back over to the story Maps website for a second just just show you some other great tools that we have available here so for your general management of story maps we have this tab called my stories as I mentioned that story maps are equally a part of ArcGIS online as your data and any web Maps you might have if you go to my story as you'll see some of that you'll see specifically the story maps that are in your user account so you can certainly go through ArcGIS online to find ER stories but you can also come here and find them for opening them up for editing them etc in addition if I click on any one story I have a number of management tools at my disposal for one it's going to show me all the content in that's included in this story the maps the images the videos it's also going to check whether these maps images videos are accessible and functioning and so right now this is great no issues are found my story map should be working as as I expect now say I had added a map that wasn't shared publicly this would actually tell me that and it would give me a one click option to fix that by sharing it I can also see the sharing settings here next to the map itself another tool have my disposal just as it as I did from within the story map I have sharing options here as well with this little this little chain link icon so when I click that chain link icon I'll open up some options for sharing now this is very similar to the options that we have when we share from within the story map itself such as the short link that I can copy and email around or share with anybody as well as the iframe a little piece of code I use for embedding in addition to that however I can set the size of the embed that I want to use and then I can preview what that embed would look like in a page of that size so here's my story map with a mock mocked up page of what that might look like so this is a good way to get that iframe code if you need it beyond management of stories we also have a number of other resources here by clicking gallery on the gallery tab you'll see a curated list of many many different story maps that we've we've found to be really good examples of different cases of different map journals of different organizations and the great work there during doing this is a good place to come if you're looking for what you can do with the story map or general inspiration for getting started with your own story map we also have a blog that is the ArcGIS blog where we will post a good deal of our documentation for different tips and tricks about story maps as well as when new releases of story maps come out and what's what you can do with them I'd also like to point you to our resources page which is a source of all sorts of support documentation you'll find video tutorials on this page some of our past presentations our frequently asked questions are often overlooked but very useful any repeated questions that we get from our author community you can find here and they're sectioned out by the different apps that they apply to so if you're looking for something like what are the recommended image resolutions for images you might add to a cascade or to a map ternal map tour you'll find those answers there there are links to our different sites such as GeoNet it's this is another way to get to our blog if you do have any developer skills we have the story Maps developers corner which is where we share some of our more technical fixes or more likely customizations to our story Maps and yeah a number of other links and resources are available to you there so on that note this is pretty much everything you need to know to get started with story maps so I'll go ahead and hand it back over to Alan who is going to show a preview of what's up and coming in story maps in the next generation thank you all very much thanks Grayson that's great so we're working on a next generation story map for a couple of reasons one is that of course we've had up until now several different user experiences that I've shown you that's great but it can create some confusion especially with first-time users who have a hard time deciding which user experience to use and if you start with one app it's you can't really back up and and pour your content into another app without a lot of cutting and pasting another issue is that for non GIS people the the making of even simple maps can be pretty challenging so for next generation we're tackling both of those plus we're unifying everything into a single builder function and and also updating the design so the idea of the single builder function is that you open a single app you start assembling a story and within that story ultimately you'll have the option of choosing user experiences that are like the immersive sections within a cascade or like a map journal or a map series or short list or you name it now the plan is to roll some of those things out sequentially we're going to launch the first version of this next generation app in in early July but in succeeding releases we'll fill it in with those additional options and user experiences meanwhile what we're calling our classic apps the existing storytelling apps will be available and up and running for a long time for many many months after this new version launches so people can transition at in on their own schedule I don't have I don't our site isn't quite ready for you to show you live although we just launched the kind of private alpha version of it so what I'm going to show you is a little video that I'm going to pause as just just to kind of emphasize certain elements within it so our plan is to have users start with an updated look to the my stories page that Grayson just showed you and then you'll be able to either open an existing story or create a new story and and then you'll have a very much a sort of what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of experience you type in title and subtitle byline automatically appears that you can you can then that you can then change if you'd like I'm gonna back up a little bit here because there's something I want to show you hold on a minute so by by clicking a little plus sign it'll turn to an X and you'll get this little pop-up that will give you a number of options to some extent like the paragraph controls within the existing cascade and up in fact the next generation story map is going to bear the closest resemblance to the Cascade builder so if you if you're used to the Cascade app it will be really easy to pick up the this this next generation version so you'll be able to choose from this a number of different options let's say you add an image similar controls for the size of the image you can type in or copy in text you can add things like hyperlinks to text as you can within the our current apps and then and then you this is where you'll have a variety of user experiences to choose among so this is roughly the equivalent of an immersive section but ultimately there will be various options so this option that's kind of mocked up here is not unlike our map tour a layout or app but again it's all within the within the single builder function so then you'll be able to to move on within the story again I'm going to back up just a little bit we'll have buttons of that that are one of the default options so if you want to create a prominent link you can do that we'll have call-out quotes we'll also be able to you'll also be able to wraps wrap the text around small images which you can't do in the current apps right now we have a separate swipe spyglass app that will be incorporated as an option within within this next generation story map now the one of the cooler parts of this is that it will incorporate a new function called Express Maps so existing GIS users will continue to be able to access all the maps that they've created or found on our GIS online but non GIS users really anybody will also be able to create really simple Maps using a very simple menu options to do things like create points to customize pop-ups trickery routes and in small area so you'll be able to very quickly create really attractive simple maps that guide users through your narrative and then embed those directly into the story at the various size options we're also optimizing all of this to load as quickly as possible and began to to to perform really really well another really cool thing is that we're going to have we'll start with maybe just two or three but we will ultimately have a whole gallery of themes so you'll be able to choose among different combinations of fonts and background colors hi colors and things like that and another really cool thing about the themes is that those Express maps that you create will also kind of redesign themselves magically to to align to the to the different themes so we're really excited about this news story map you'll also that we've got better at editing and publishing options as well as part of the part of the next generation Oh as I mentioned before all our stories are already responsive but we're working very hard to make the next generation work really beautifully on mobile devices as well as tablets and PCs so both in terms of performance and just in terms of the user experience it's going to be really slick we're really excited about this it's also going to be a very busy year as we develop this it's a whole lot of work as you might imagine so that's that's the that's the picture in a nutshell and I'm gonna show you this this story so so we're far enough along to again to have just launched an alpha version there will be a public beta later in the spring probably early April so you'll be able to kind of kick the tires on it but this is a live story that we created using the still kind of embryonic new app as you can see this doesn't have the equivalent of an immersive session yeah that's that's that's the next step in our development but it's already even in its current state a pretty powerful storytelling tool that we feel has a has a nice kind of fresh contemporary look so I think we're starting to run short on time we wanted to leave a little time for questions and discussions so I'm gonna I'm going to wrap it up there thanks a lot Thank You Alan and Grayson that was a lot of really great content it was exciting to see the new the new generation of story maps so as soon as my screen pops up you will see that we have time for questions so first question and this is to you Alan or Grayson can you overlay a conceptual site drawing onto a proposed construction site a site drawing undo it well you can certainly do it if you create a map of that site so let's just say you've got you know you might use our satellite base map to show the site as it appears today and then you might create either directly in our GIS online or our GIS desktop a plan of the of the you know of the new construction that you would overlay then on the on the satellite image and then you could use our various tools to you know either to have a kind of swipe tool to reveal you get the plans or or turn on that overlay layer on top of the imagery to to show the show the project grace and anything to add to that no I think you pretty much hit it Alan because again there's probably a couple ways you could do it you if you work with ArcGIS desktop you can certainly create a drawing and geo-reference it and upload that as an image you could also simply use if it's a simple drawing the map notes that I demonstrated in the web map you also have the option to draw basic lines and polygons using that tool so if you needed to do something does very quickly you could do it in there as well perfect thank you two more questions will the next generation of story maps be limited exclusively to cascade story map well did not no not really so the idea is that that the basic kind of default experience would be a scroll experience like cascade but you'll be able to to say have a title page and then go directly to the equivalent of an immersive section and have that within that you you can you you will be able to choose among different user experiences so in other words you could go directly from a title you know any number of formats for a title page into a story that's very much like the current map or map journal etc or you can create you know create those sections within a longer kind of scroll experience perfect another question came in what is the best way to embed a story map in a story map we have a series style story map and want to add another story map within it would that be a cascade within a series dial yeah good question we see a lot of this so series is really useful for embedding other story maps and I do that a lot of often for my presentations so what people most frequently do is use a steer a series to show a number of either story map journals or cascade story maps it can be really effective but but with one caveat and that is that if you think a portion of a significant portion of your users are going to be accessing the story via mobile phones as you can imagine the experience of story maps embedded within other story maps can start to get it kind of messy on a on a really small screen and I've actually seen story maps buried four deep and that you know would simply not be working workable on a on a mobile phone so depending on your audience depending on your context putting especially cascade or journal story maps within a series story map can be can be really effective but really only for users on larger screens yeah and just to add to that there are also URL parameters available for story maps that can help with the embed experience specifically there's a parameter for its ampersand embed ampersand embe D that if you add that on to the end of your story Maps URL and then embed that and use that URL to embed and the other story map you'll then lose things you'll minimize the user interface essentially so like the extra header you might get of a cascade embedded in a series will disappear so it's it's a it's a very subtle effect but it can be very useful for getting some extra real estate and we have blogs that talk about that if anybody needs more specific direction thank you so one final question before we wrap up any tips or tricks for loading tribal or indigenous fonts or is it better to copy and paste pieces of text into the body Oh interesting so clarification quest goal this is the font itself are these the characters actual you know letters what we might have to follow up with them offline and we'll share the details with everyone in a post email because we didn't get that far down into the detail on the question but that is a great question and we can follow up by email yeah we'd have to be happy to follow up on that perfect so with that we will wrap this up before we leave you we wanted to make sure all of you are aware aware that the tribal storymap challenge for 2019 has begun we opened the challenge yesterday this is our first activity within so now that you have all of these great resources we encourage you to enter the challenge this year the submission deadline is Friday March 29th at 5:00 p.m. Pacific all of the winners will be announced no later than Friday April 12th and we have some great prizes for you an ArcGIS online account access to ESRI training and a recognition at the 2019 as your user conference in San Diego each tribe is allowed to submit up to three story maps and it is the link to the story map challenge is in the questions console or the GoToWebinar console and the questions section so you can click on that and visit the site easily it's go as recom slash 2019 TSMC webinar tsmc for tribal storymap challenge if you have any questions regarding this challenge the tribal team is here to help myself Noelle Loughran and where John Zico would be happy to help just shoot us an email at tribal storymap challenge @s recom and we will get back to you with any of our responses thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day thanks a lot thank you all you

Channel: Esri Industries

Views: 7,846

Rating: 4.884058 out of 5

Keywords: Tribal Government, Storytelling, Story Maps, Esri, GIS, Geographic Information System, story maps, ArcGIS, story map challenge, storytelling, government, tribal

Id: IjOkeTBlr9c

Length: 60min 47sec (3647 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 22 2019