Making a StoryMap

You’ve already explored StoryMaps in our recent Digital Lab.

Now, for your first Digital Tools Assignment, you will create your own StoryMaps project in order to express a particular historical and spatial narrative. You may map a historical narrative of your choice, or you may pull from sources we have discussed in class so far. It might be a good idea to choose a historical topic about which you already know a little something, or to begin working with the sources you’ve selected for your final project. You’ll need to think about where you can find images to use within your StoryMap, and the web is a good place to start–especially the digitized resources in Princeton’s special collections. Your project should include at least 8 locations, should include relevant short descriptions, should have a clear overarching theme, and should be shareable with others in the class.

Instructions:

StoryMaps is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. It’s free to use with a Google drive account (your Princeton account works fine). You simply upload images, or link to images from the web, that you then connect to points on a map. You can make changes to the map schema, fonts, and color and layout. Before beginning your StoryMap, you may want to take a look at the gallery of examples on the StoryMaps site. When you complete your StoryMap you’ll embed your StoryMap into a blog post using Markdown and GitHub, as usual.

As you create your project, you may wish to consider:

  • What historical narrative are you trying to express?
  • Which sources did you choose to use and why?
  • What dates and places are essential to your narrative and spreadsheet?
  • What do we learn by seeing this historical narrative unfold in space and time simultaneously?
  • What text or images will be helpful to supplement the results in order to create an engaging visual narrative?

Instructions for Submission:

Once you’ve created your StoryMap, it’s time to embed it into a post. You’ve already practiced writing a blog post in Markdown in our first Digital Tools assignment. Now it’s time to use those same skills to write up the process of creating your StoryMap. Follow these steps:

  1. Create your StoryMap.
  2. Either directly in our GitHub repository in the branch draft-posts or in your text editor create a new Markdown file with the naming conventions we’ve practiced in your first Digital Tools Assignment (YYYY-MM-DD-Post Title.md).
  3. Write a 4–5 paragraph post answering the questions listed above. Write well and clearly! Think of this as equivalent to a 1-2 page response paper.
  4. Copy the HTML embed code that appears when you “share” your Story Map or TimeMapper.
  5. Paste the HTML embed code into your Markdown file at a point in your writing that makes sense.
  6. Create a New Branch in our course repository. Click the arrow to the right of master in the branch menu, and in the search box type in the name of the new branch you’ll create: yourname-storymaps. Click the option that appears that says Create branch: yourname-storymaps.
  7. Upload your post into the _posts folder of the new branch, Commit your changes, and create a Pull Request to merge it with the master branch of our repository. Pay attention and be sure you select the right head for your request.

Ok, that’s it! You’ve done it!