Telling Stories with Maps

During his 27-year career at the National Geographic Society, Allen designed scores of maps for its renowned magazine and other publications. Beginning his NGS career on the staff of the magazine’s art department, he became its art director, designing diagrams, infographics, and historical reconstructions. As the Society’s chief cartographer from 1998 to 2010, he was deeply involved in the creation of the Society’s renowned reference and wall maps, globes, and atlases, and oversaw creation of scores of page maps and large-format supplement maps for the magazine. He led the creation of the Seventh and Eighth editions of the World Atlas, incorporating satellite imagery and innovative thematic maps into the editions and integrating them for the first time with interactive Web resources. He spearheaded the publication of many new web resources and other special projects featuring biodiversity, conservation, and indigenous cultures. After joining Esri in 2010, he founded its StoryMaps team, which developed web tools that enabled hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations to tell place-based stories combining interactive maps and multimedia content. He continues to lead an editorial team that publishes ArcGIS StoryMaps and supports a global community of storytellers who have used StoryMaps to create millions of multimedia narratives.

Introduction

Foreword

Chapter 1. Why tell stories? The power of stories 

Chapter 2. Why maps?

Chapter 3. Maps and minds: How our brains stored and retrieve mental maps

Chapter 4: From analog to digital: How maps went from nouns to verbs

Chapter 5: The story of StoryMaps

Chapter 6: Maps in dramatic roles: The various functions maps serve within multimedia narratives

Chapter 7: Nine steps to great storytelling

Chapter 8: The best of the best

Chapter 9: Telling stories with maps: A practical guide

Conclusion