My latest foray into digital history techniques involved creating a story map. We’ve been learning about how to incorporate space and time into historical narratives in Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives by Bodenhamer, Corrigan, and Harris. This was a new concept to me, as I’m used to reading a scholarly monograph (or any historical work, for that matter) that is mostly text with some maps thrown in at the beginning or end. But “deep maps” are much more than that. As the name suggests, they have a depth that is lacking in conventional cartography. Deep maps remind me of a three-dimensional object, such as a cylinder, that has volume in contrast to a two-dimensional rectangle. It contains all of the things that have happened or existed within a particular space in the world and provides a richer–and perhaps more accurate–expression of history than mere text can convey.
There are many kinds of deep maps, but they all aim to tell a “spatial narrative.” They combine geographic information systems (GIS) with other methodologies. In our lab, we used ESRI ArcGIS Online to create a story map of four or five places where we’ve lived or traveled. You could plot these locations on a conventional map and then discuss them in accompanying text, but the Story Maps tool allows you to insert images (or videos) and text for each location. This way, the location is more than just a point on a map; it has the depth of your memories and experiences, as well as the visual representation of that place. What makes it also a story is the meaningful connection of the places. At the beginning, the first location is highlighted and you can look through the images and read the text, but as you scroll down, you move to the next place in the order in which the creator arranged them. In other words, although you can click on each location to bring up its information, the locations are not plotted randomly. You are guided on a journey through space and time.
While the Story Maps tool is pretty user-friendly, meaning you don’t have to be that tech-savvy to use it, the Web Map tool on ArcGIS has a steeper learning curve. This tool allows you to create deep maps to visualize more complex realities, such as COVID-19 cases across the United States or the world. There are many functions to let you customize such a map, from the appearance of the base map to the size and color of the points. After reading a book like Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives, and perhaps participating in a GIS workshop, you would need to spend a lot of time with ArcGIS to learn how to get the most out of this tool. Nevertheless, it seems quite powerful and useful for digital humanities scholars. In my field, I think it would be interesting to participate in Waitman Wade Beorn’s projects for Visualizing the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, which uses ArcGIS.
Here is the story map I created: