This week, the Fellows were asked to research a digital tool. I decided to work with StoryMap JS. StoryMap is a digital mapping tool that allows you pinpoint specific areas on a map you want to describe, add text, and images to. This tool stood out to me because it was very easy to use and I was really able to play around with it. StoryMap also seemed like the most functional digital mapping tool use for my project. It worked the way I wanted it to work for my project and I was able to bring the vision that was in my head to reality. The other mapping tools seemed more complicated than StoryMap and not as useful for my project.
This tool is completely free to use and very accessible to the public. All you need is a Google account, and is this day and age you are bound to create a Google account sooner or later in life. It is a very user friendly tool. There was some directional advice, but I have a very bad habit of not reading directions and decided to get right to it. I am personally not very tech savvy yet and I was able to get the hang of it very quickly. Although StoryMap was pretty easy to use, I did find myself having a hard time understanding what they meant by some of their setting options. For example, I wasn’t sure exactly what “toner lite”, “gigapixel”, or “map box” meant.
The only part that I know I will definitely need help with is inserting a picture as the map background instead of the standard maps StoryMap gives you. I would like to use old Gettysburg College maps I found in Special Collections as background maps. I was told that I could absolutely make that happen–I would just need to change the maps setting to “Gigapixel”. At first, I thought this would be an easy task to figure out on my own, but I was mistaken. I was very confused when I changed the setting to Gigapixel and was unsure what I was supposed to put in the information boxes.
Still trying to see if I could figure out this task on my own, I decided to enlist the help of the internet. The technical detail tab on the StoryMap website told me how to insert the image by way of coding. Having only completed half of Codecademy, I definitely did not have the knowledge to understand the directions. But, we will be having a mapping workshop in the future where I am sure I will be able to get some help.
Overall I really enjoyed using this digital tool. If you are new to using digital tools and need an easy mapping tool, this definitely could work for you. I am considering using it in my digital project but am unsure if it compatible with Scalar. If I am able to use StoryMap, great! If not, I am open to learning how to use other digital mapping tools!
Great work. One thing to keep in mind when reading the StorymapJS documentation is that a lot of it is geared to people who are going to install their own version of StorymapJS on a server and manually add datapoints and styling … so really, the ability to customize a Storymap is kind of limited. It’s one of the bigger issues I have had when working with it, since there are several default settings that don’t seem to make a lot of sense.