Story maps are a useful addition to the mapping toolkit.
The ESRI product allows anyone with a modicum of patience to create dynamic or just static map based presentations, then roll them into a fancy slide presentation fairly easily. There are nice tools that embed images and video, compare maps, pull in your own data from CSV, SHP, KML, geojson etc.
There is also a consumer version, which is very attractively priced. Compared to the high entry costs (£1000 +++) of the full ESRI product, it is attractive for certain projects. The consumer product, which includes a free plan, doesn’t integrate at all with the commercial product and doesn’t allow you to import GIS files. It is also quite glitchy, but then so is the commercial product.
Green Blue Spaces
For the Green Blue Spaces project I used the consumer version. I had already created some static map presentations with a graphical package called Ortelius, as labelling in QGIS is such a chore and reports are clearly too long for anyone to read.
The following was created over a few hours using the Fourth Statistical Account for East Lothian, a website that I had laboriously migrated to WordPress a few years ago (from an unheard of CMS). This presentation uses the entry level commercial product from ESRI.
4th Statistical Account
Another one I made, again using an older basemap for additional authenticity to promote local history societies.
East Lothian Heritage Societies
And finally, a quick update with some experimental maps i.e. they are a work in progress, again with a darker East Lothian slant.
Here we are using a variety of data sources (csv, geojson) and presentation styles, to show off the sorts of things that are possible. Less story mapping, but hopefully the maps speak for themselves.
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