How To Cascade: Media
Sling Maps, Images, and Video Around In Your Story
How does one rebuild after a hamster zombie apocalypse nearly wipes out all of humankind? The same way we've been overcoming extinction-level events for thousands of years: rich multimedia narratives, of course.
Please, join me in a triumphant walk-through of post-apocalyptic rebuilding efforts via a media-packed Cascade story map. In this How To Cascade, we'll blaze our way through an assortment of maps, images, and video, documenting for posterity the multitude of formats supported by Cascade. Oops, I mean, the story of how civilization endured.
Buckle up, we're about to...
Add Maps to a Story | If you are writing a Story Map, there's a good chance your story wants a map in it. I mean...right? It should have a map.
Add Images to a Story | Pepper your story with eyewatering visuals to break out of a cartographic tyranny. Up for a breath. Provide context.
Add Video to a Story | Ah, a judiciously selected video clip can really breathe some life into this thing.
Embed Stuff | The web is a window of windows. Sometimes you just need to punch a hole into another website to fully tell your story.
Add Non-Interactive Maps to a Story | Wait, what? Awww yeahhh. Just because you have a map doesn't mean it has to be full-bore interactive. Often a static map image, or a video of a map walk-through, is a pleasingly lightweight plenty-good-enough alternative.
But How? Where?!
As you build your own Story Map, you'll notice that there are all these little "+" icons tacked to the end of each paragraph...
A world of unspeakable pleasures awaits you on the other side. Clicking that "+" shows a small menu asking what sort of content you'd like to add to the story. We'll be talking about adding media...
Clicking the "Media" button opens up the Story Maps media picker, where a host of possibilities exist. Chief among them, maps.
Maps
Oddly, and conveniently, the hamsters that survived the zombie virus proceeded to develop sentience. Together with the, rather gracious, human survivors, we forged a new society. It was time of unparalleled rebuilding.
It was actually the hamsters' idea to build new states around Craigslist sites. The hamsters, for all their quirks, turned out to be quite an economically pragmatic cross-species ally. Here's a look at one of the early proposals for state divisions, sketched on a chalkboard with their tiny little paws.
Sometimes you'll want readers to be able to navigate and explore maps like this one. In that case, choose the ArcGIS tab and behold the myriad of content available to you...
So, if you have an ArcGIS Online map, or app, or 3D Scene, then by all means -bring that thing on in and let it tell its story. You can browse the universe of maps in ArcGIS Online, or a filtered view of the ones in your organization, or just yours, or even the stuff you may have already added to the story (a handy shortcut if you have a map that makes multiple appearances).
Oh my goodness! Did you notice how the map is updating along with this narrative? You can, and should, do that sort of thing with an interactive map. Be the storyteller.
Images
Story maps don't have to be all maps. Sometimes you might consider letting your readers pop up for air, by showing a context-building photograph. For instance, it took a bit of time for the now-intelligent surviving hamsters to convince the understandably timid humans that they felt pretty badly about it all and wanted to partner in the whole societal reestablishment thing.
There are lots of options for adding images to your story. If you have your own image then you can just upload it. It will be saved in your ArcGIS account.
Maybe the best image for you is already on the web. In that case, you can search for it on Flickr, Google+, the free and amazing Unsplash, or just link right to an online image by pasting its URL. If you link directly though, make sure the image file size is reasonable, so it loads quickly.
If you detected the fade transition between this series of sad photographs, then kudos to you. Delve into the armchair psychology of transitions here, if you're up for it.
Pictures are great. But what if we lived in a world where you could paint with light, harnessing the power of moving pictures? We could call them...movies.
Video
The judicious use of streaming video can add a real sense of dynamism to your story. Maybe it's a beautiful visual tour of the location of interest, or a commentary by an expert. Or maybe it's footage of tiny hamsters running their adorable machinery helping us rebuild our post-apocalyptic world...
Cascade supports pulling in videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo. Just link to their URL (via a share link or just the web page where the video lives).
Those hamsters sure can move some earth.
Occasionally (rarely?) you just need to provide a direct window right in to an existing web page as a (risky) resource for your readers.
Embeds
You can paste the "embed" snippet of a chart or some other element that helps tell your story. Or you can just paste the URL of a web page. For instance, it may provide helpful context for readers to learn about pre-zombie, pre-sentience, hamsters...
Ok, let's get back to maps. I'm starting to get the shakes, having not seen a map in this story for far too long.
Static Maps
Static? Like not interactive? Yes! The ArcGIS ecosystem lets you crank out some top notch cartography. But that often times takes the form of maps for print, or image exports. Choosing map images for your story can make a lot of sense for reasons of clear communication and for a snappy user experience. There's no hoping that your reader navigates to the right spot, or clicks the right thing. They'll see just what you, the person with maps and a story, show them. Plus, images load quickly and are supported on any device.
Take, for instance, this series of static maps walking through the reconstruction phase.
When the Hamsters suggested the Craigslist economic zones as the hubs around which to build new states, GIS analysts got to work whipping up some models to guide the legislation.
They created drive-time based service areas around each named Craigslist location and grew the zones out to neighboring zones.
In case you were wondering, yes, the hamster zombie apocalypse left Canada and Mexico pretty much unscathed.
Using these service areas to inform practical political boundaries, the New United States emerged from the zombie hamster apocalypse with strong spatial skills and a new ally.
In time, through the generations, hamsters and humanity learned to work together, forging a mammalian partnership that transcended the chaos and destruction of a difficult past.
Likewise, a blend of media can empower and contextualize maps, more fully and richly telling the stories bottled within them. Images and video are, in turn, made stronger and more relevant when saturated in location.
How To Cascade: Media was created using Story Map Cascade.
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Photographs (pre-hamster)
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Chalkboard Craigslist States
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Drive Time Analysis
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